THE lnhULObi 
Or A FRFACHER 



w 

LYNN HAROLD 
HOUGH 



Class 
Book 



OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR 

THE LURE OF BOOKS 12mo, net, 25 cents. 
ATHANASIUS : THE HERO 12mo, net, $1. 



THE THEOLOGY 
OF A PREACHER 



BY 

LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 

/I 




NEW YORK : EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



Copyright, 1912, by 
EATON & MAINS 



£CIA309502 

NO. 



TO MY FRIENDS OF 
SUMMERFIELD CHURCH 
WITH DEEP APPRECIATION 
A HAPPY PASTORATE 



CONTENTS 



Chapter page 

An Introductory Word 7 

I The Significance of His Own Experience ... 13 

II The Men Among Whom He Lives 25 

III The Supreme Tragedy 37 

IV The Place of Christ 49 

V The Deed on Calvary 61 

VI Salvation 75 

VII The Goal of Sainthood 87 

VIII A Christian Experience and the Rest of a 

Man's Life 99 

IX The Regeneration of Society Ill 

X The Far-Flung Battle Line 123 

XI The Ceaseless Ministry of the Holy Ghost . 135 

XII The Church and the Christian Task 151 

XIII The Great Companionship 163 

XIV Christian Stewardship 175 

XV The God of the Preacher 187 

XVI The Practical Value of the Doctrine of the 

Trinity 199 

XVII The Preacher and Religious Authority. ... 213 

XVIII The Preacher and His Bible 229 

XIX Peering into the Future 243 

XX The Christian World-View 257 



AN INTRODUCTORY WORD 

The Queen of the Sciences can scarcely 
be called the Queen of the Preachers — 
at least not now. In all the multiplied 
studies and activities of the modern preacher 
that consuming interest in Christian doc- 
trine which characterized heroic men who 
once made pulpits thrones has been very 
much lost sight of. It is the conviction of 
the author of this book that the adequate 
preacher must be a preacher-theologian. 
With that conviction burning in his heart 
these chapters have been written. 

This volume is not a systematic theology. 
At a later time the author hopes to write 
a fully worked out and articulated dis- 
cussion of "The Organism of Christian 
Belief." In the meantime thoughts about 
the theology which can be preached, which 
surge in his mind and have been given 
out in his own ministry, are here expressed. 

No apology is made for the devotional 
mood which pervades these chapters. The 
fallacy of trying to write about religion 

7 



AN INTRODUCTORY WORD 



without being religious scarcely needs de- 
tailed criticism. The mood of the book is 
like the mood of the preacher — it is that 
of proclamation rather than argument. 
The test of the whole matter is not a de- 
tailed process of reasoning. At last every- 
thing rests on whether what is said comes 
out of life and will eventuate in more life. 

In writing this note of introduction I 
want to include a word of appreciation of 
my own teacher in systematic theology, 
Professor Olin A. Curtis. His moral enthu- 
siasm, his penetrating evangelical sensitive- 
ness, and his constant eagerness to organize 
Christian truth into a vital system have 
made him a most kindling teacher and 
a theologian of apostolic zeal. 

I by no means mean to claim his agree- 
ment with everything in this book. Doubt- 
less his sharp instruments of analysis will 
find enough to criticize. At any rate, he 
is the first man to recognize that in 
theology, as elsewhere, a man must live 
his own life and speak his own message. 

The preacher-theologian has at least one 
cause for congratulation. Human nature 

8 



AN INTRODUCTORY WORD 



is on his side. Man is a theological being, 
and sooner or later he must ask the 
theological questions. In an age of shifting 
as to thought, and constant demand as 
to activity, this may temporarily be lost 
sight of. But in the long run theology 
will come to its own. There is no way 
to get rid of a thing the call for which is 
structural in the life of man. 

Lynn Harold Hough. 
Brooklyn, New York, 
January, 1912. 



9 



CHAPTER I 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HIS OWN 
EXPERIENCE 



CHAPTER I 

The Significance of His Own 
Experience 

The first important thing about a preacher 
is that he should be alive. This is by no 
means so obvious as it sounds. To be 
rich in vital qualities, to be quickly re- 
sponsive to all the currents that play 
through human experience, to be vividly, 
deeply, and vigorously alive is as superb 
as it is rare. There are correct preachers, 
there are earnest preachers, there are 
learned preachers, there are eloquent 
preachers; and their qualities are very 
important for every preacher. When he 
adds to them the quality of magnetic, con- 
tagious vitality, then a man is a preacher 
indeed. 

But we mean something even deeper 
than this quality of winsome human eager- 
ness which captures constant friends when 
we say that a preacher must be alive. We 
mean that he must have lived and fought, 
that he must have struggled and aspired, 
13 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



that he must have failed and that he must 
have succeeded, that joy and sorrow, the 
hour of waiting and the hour of bewilder- 
ment must have been his. We mean pre- 
eminently that, passing through the 
winding pathway of his experience, he 
must have come to a great discovery. He 
must have discovered the adequacy of 
Christ. Jesus must have ceased to be 
merely the Christ of history. He must 
have become the Christ of experience. 

Every preacher must make this dis- 
covery for himself. He sails out across 
the unknown ocean and discovers the new 
continent of Christian experience, just as 
if it had never been discovered before. 
Every man is his own Columbus here, 
and his experience is as fresh and full of 
wonder as if no other man had known the 
joy of the same discovery. 

It is the combination of a deep ex- 
perience of human things and a deep 
experience of divine things which makes a 
man a preacher, and it is exactly this 
combination which makes a man a theo- 
logian. At least, it is this which makes 

14 



HIS OWN EXPERIENCE 



him the kind of a theologian whose 
theology can be preached. 

Of course the preacher- theologian is a 
student. He knows what it is to brood 
over his Bible until its very spirit enters 
his life. He studies it until the rhythmic 
music of its great phrases rings through 
the corridors of his memory. He studies 
it with all the implements of modern 
scholarship, that his knowledge may not 
only be rich and deep, but accurate and 
scientific. He studies it until the ancient 
life out of which it comes is pictured in 
his own mind clearly and vividly. He 
journeys often into that far past until he 
has entered into the meaning of its ex- 
perience. He opens all the windows of 
his life until the light which shines in the 
Scriptures is radiant in his own soul. 
But he brings to his study of the Bible 
two great personal contributions. He does 
not come with an empty mind. He comes 
as a human struggler who has looked out 
on life with palpitating interest, who has 
felt its heat, sometimes warming, some- 
times burning; who has felt its cold, some- 
15 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



times stimulating, sometimes freezing. He 
brings all his alert interest in the world 
and people. It is as a man of men, drip- 
ping with human experience, that he comes 
to the Bible, and all this human quality 
is one of his best equipments as a student 
of God's Word. 

He also brings his experience as a Chris- 
tian. The Son of God has mastered his 
life. The Saviour has whispered a great 
word of peace in his soul. He has been 
made a citizen of the kingdom of God. 
He has tasted the joy of the great Christian 
freedom. The world has been made into a 
new world for him because of his contact 
with Jesus Christ. The wonder of a new 
life moving in his heart and brain, the 
rich joy of a man who has found forgive- 
ness and peace, the new perspective as to 
life and God and destiny, which his ex- 
perience as a Christian has given him, he 
brings to the Bible. So as a man of men 
and a man of God he extracts from 
the Scriptures their fundamental theological 
conceptions, his reading and his study 
constantly guided and checked by his 

16 



HIS OWN EXPERIENCE 



experience as a man and his experience as 
a Christian. 

Of course he is a student of church 
history. He studies it because it tells of 
the past of men. He studies it because 
it tells of the past of Christian men. He 
does not read it as a scholastic exercise. 
He reads it as a revelation of life. This 
story of how other men have interpreted 
the gospel, this story of how other Chris- 
tians have lived and of what they have 
thought, is of the greatest interest to him. 
Slowly through all the burdened years the 
thought of the Church has clarified. The 
logic of experience has decided against 
some ways of looking at the faith. It 
has decided for others. The history of 
the Church is a sort of vast laboratory 
showing how almost every sort of theolog- 
ical conception has worked when it has 
been put to the test of life. The preacher 
reads with infinite interest. He wants to 
make no mistakes in the conceptions he 
flings forth hot and creative to mold the 
lives of his people. He wants to learn 
the lessons of the past. Here too he brings 
17 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

all his experience as a man and as a Chris- 
tian. He tests the history of the Church 
by a standard he finds in his own life. 
It is made vivid for him because he inter- 
prets it in the light of his own struggle 
and his own peace. So, because he reads 
the history of the Church with the light 
of his life as a man and his life as a Chris- 
tian shining on it, he draws from it the 
deepest truths the growing life of the 
Church has to tell. He discovers the con- 
tribution the history of the Church and 
the Church's thought has to make to the 
theology of a preacher. 

Of course he is a student of systematic 
theology. He understands the eagerness of 
the great theologians to articulate the 
truths of the Christian faith into a strong 
symmetrical organism of belief. He too 
desires "to see life steadily and to see it 
whole." He desires to climb to some 
eminence where he can see the whole of 
the city of God — the way the streets of 
the city lie, their relation to each other, 
and just where the great buildings stand. 
He wants to see just how the truths of 

18 



HIS OWN EXPERIENCE 



the faith fit together in one total view of 
tilings. And right zestfully he follows the 
endeavors of the great thinkers to build 
the structure of their philosophy of the 
Christian faith. Here too our preacher 
brings his memories, his knowledge, and 
his hopes as a man, his memories, his 
knowledge, and his hopes as a Christian. 

He knows the danger of making a sys- 
tem logical but lifeless. He knows the 
danger of the dissecting room. He does 
not want to study the corpse of the Christian 
faith. He wants to study Christianity alive, 
dominant, the blood rich and pure, the 
whole vigor of triumphant vitality in every 
limb. So he tests all that the theologians 
say by his life as a man and his life as a 
Christian. Theology must be kept human, 
and it must be kept electric with the 
energy of the gospel. It must face all 
the facts of life; it must face all the facts 
of God. So, studying theology with the 
tests his manhood and his Christian expe- 
rience give, he is able constantly to move 
toward a Christian view of things which 
shall be symmetrical, the truths articulated 
19 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



together; which shall be warmly human, 
the theology of living men; and which shall 
glow with all the beauty of the life of God 
in the soul of man. 

The preacher-theologian is a student of 
the world's literature. He studies it be- 
cause it is the most revealing output as 
to the souls of men. He studies it because 
it is a sort of gigantic mirror held up to 
the past. If the Bible is a great revela- 
tion of God, literature is a great revelation 
of men. Their noisy activities, their quiet 
thoughts, their mounting aspirations, their 
cold, hard despairs, their torrid, tropical 
joys, their wonder and hope and fear — all 
these and much more he finds waiting his 
study in the literature of the world. It 
has captured human joy and held it bound 
in garlands of speech. It has captured 
human strength and built it into sentences 
like cedars. It has gained possession of 
the heart, the brain, and the will of man 
and expressed them in imperishable speech. 
Not simply the "still sad music of hu- 
manity," but all the varieties of the 
music of humanity, its majors, and its 
" 20 



HIS OWN EXPERIENCE 



minors, and its harsh, grating discords, 
are here. 

But to read literature without a guide 
is to be lost in a confusion of conflicting 
emotions. It is to have a sense of dashing 
human feeling beating against one's life 
without any real comprehension of its mean- 
ing. The preacher-theologian reads the 
world's literature with the two guides he 
has brought to his other study. His own 
experience as a man helps him to interpret 
this vast maelstrom of human emotion ex- 
pressed in words. His experience as a 
Christian gives him a standard by which 
to appraise and value it. He knows that 
which at its best literature has found. He 
knows that which at its worst literature 
has missed. He knows the word which 
has healing for the tale of woe it tells, 
the way of peace after all its torturing 
unrest, and the way of victory after its sin. 

So at every point the preacher in his 
study is essentially a man of God and a 
man of men. His experience gives him 
keys to the meaning of that which he finds 
in books and that which he finds in the 
21 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



world about him. He has the benefit of 
academic training, but academic discipline 
has not contributed the defining element to 
his equipment. As a man with the real 
past in human things and in the things of 
Christ he approaches his tasks. 



22 



CHAPTER II 



THE MEN AMONG WHOM HE 
LIVES 



CHAPTER II 

The Men among Whom He Lives 

There is a contrast which the preacher 
faces in his study of man. On the one 
hand, he reads the chapters on anthropology 
in his books on systematic theology. On 
the other, he thinks of James Brown and 
John Smith and all the other men he 
knows. Between the anthropology and con- 
crete men there seems to be a great gulf 
fixed. How shall he so think of James 
and John as to take advantage of all the 
profound principles he has learned in the 
books on theology as they discuss man ? 
And how shall he so read the discussions 
in the volumes on theology as to add to 
them the concreteness and the tang of 
reality which belong to actual human be- 
ings ? How shall he keep his theory of 
man human ? And how shall he keep his 
thinking about actual living men philosoph- 
ically adequate? 

These very questions are revealing as to 
the necessary answers. They suggest a 
25 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



constant bringing of theology to the test 
of life, and a study of life in the light of 
the profoundest principles which come to 
light as a result of theological discipline. 

In truth, the preacher occupies a position 
of strategy in respect of this whole situa- 
tion. He has to do with the theory of 
man. He has to do with actual men. He 
ought to be able to construct a doctrine 
of man which will be philosophically ade- 
quate and yet surge with the blood of life. 

When the preacher-theologian approaches 
the problem in this attitude, with a sense 
of concrete men and their actual behavior 
in the background of his thinking, he is 
at once struck by the fact that the men of 
the Bible correspond to his experience of 
actual men. Whether it be David or 
Solomon or Peter or John, whether it be 
Abraham or Jeremiah or Paul or John the 
Baptist, the men of the Bible impress the 
reader as actual human beings. The first 
appeal of the Bible is that it introduces 
you to a company of real people. 

Now, leaving out of account for the 
present the great moral tragedy which 
26 



MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES 



blights the lives of the men of the Bible 
and the men of the world about us, what 
are the defining and significant facts about 
the people whose fingers touch ours in the 
daily experiences of life, and those whose 
faces look out upon us from the ancient 
Scriptures ? 

Three outstanding facts impress the stu- 
dent of men's lives: they can know, they 
can do, and they can feel. The whole of 
human experience and the whole of the 
doctrine of man hang about the significance 
of these three facts. 

The knowledge of the ordinary man in 
the parish of the preacher is, of course, 
a very different matter from the knowledge 
of the scientific investigator or the trained 
thinker. The mind of many a man is 
much like an old curiosity shop, with odds 
and ends of knowledge scattered every- 
where in the most disorderly fashion. Then 
there are minds like country stores, with 
the knowledge needed for daily use con- 
veniently shelved, but carrying very little 
stock which does not have to do with 
immediate practical demands. Then there 
27 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



are minds like art stores, which seem to 
carry a stock of ideas with reference to 
their beauty rather than their utility. The 
use of this mental material is varied enough. 
Often it is allowed to be covered with 
dust. There are people who actually use 
their minds in positive thought only as a 
matter of last resort when everything else 
has failed. There are untrained men with 
a shrewd practical use of the instruments 
of the mind which is a constant surprise 
to the observer. There are men who use 
all mental skill to arrange their view of 
life according to their own likes and dis- 
likes rather than according to the reality 
of things. There are minds which are slow 
but sure-footed. There are minds which 
have wings but soon tire. There are minds 
which work with fine steadiness and minds 
which work by jerks. All of this mental 
variety the preacher meets in his contact 
with men. Out of this experience come 
his first convictions about man. The power 
to know is a growing thing. It needs 
training and guidance. The power to know 
is a moral thing. It must be used with 

28 



MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES 



heroic candor or it will become an instru- 
ment of deception. 

The second fact about men is their 
ability to do. When we say that a man 
can do things we mean something different 
in kind as well as quantity from what we 
mean when we say that a horse can do 
things. The horse obeys the machinery of 
an animal life. The man obeys the be- 
hests of a free and knowing mind. With 
man, back of the physical act is a mental 
act. He does a thing with his mind before 
he does it with his hand. 

This doing with consciousness and free- 
dom is not a characteristic of all human 
activity, but it is a characteristic of much 
of the activity of all human beings. Men 
share the life of the lower creation, and 
their actions are often intuitive and mechan- 
ical, the expression of flashing impulse and 
quick desire. But a man can command 
his activity. He can make it the servant 
of his mind. He chooses how much he 
shall be like a beast and how much he 
shall be like manhood at its highest. 

This mixture of deeds which are a sort 
29 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



of mechanical response to environment and 
deeds which are the slaves of a mastering 
mind is seen among men everywhere. It 
is the necessary assumption of practical life 
that man has the power of reigning over 
his deeds. It is the clear verdict of careful 
observation that he does not always do it. 
Sometimes nature has its way with him. 
No end of speculative perplexity and diffi- 
culty may be encountered by the thinker 
who attempts to deal with these facts. The 
preacher-theologian is saved from much 
academic confusion and many verbal straits 
by applying the test of life at this point. 
All of human experience is based on the 
implicit assumption of freedom. It is a 
major premise of life. It must not be dis- 
turbed. But in many ways it is true that 
freedom is a possibility rather than a com- 
plete possession. The preacher comes to 
certain definite convictions in respect of 
this matter. At his high point of expe- 
rience man is free in the decisions which 
lead to his deeds. The mastery of his 
activity is a solemn demand which life 
makes of him. It is his duty to be free. 

30 



MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES 



The third significant fact about the life 
of a man is that he can feel. Some things 
appeal to him more than others. Some 
people appeal to him more than others. 
He does not meet life with a cold, critical 
stare. He has all sorts of feelings about it. 
The negative of love is hate. As some 
things and people draw him, so some things 
and people repulse him. There is a spon- 
taneous up-reach of feeling in response to 
all the experiences of life. 

This matter of feeling is one of much 
subtlety and perplexity. A man cannot 
directly command his feelings as he can 
command his actions. He cannot decide to 
feel in a certain way. If he attempts to 
do it, there is simply no emotional response. 

On the other hand, a close observation 
of men makes it clear that if the deep 
trend of the life moves in a certain direc- 
tion, in the long run the feelings follow. 
If a man keeps acting on a certain feeling's 
suggestion, it grows in strength. If he re- 
fuses to make it the basis of a deed, it 
tends to waste away and die. All this 
involves what may be called the indirect 
31 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



control of the feelings. Whatever kind of 
an emotional outfit a man has, he may 
become the possessor of a noble devotion 
by a continued habit of doing noble things. 
The response is not immediate, but if the 
evil emotions which enter the house of a 
man's life are treated with continual cold- 
ness, at last they realize that they are not 
welcome and go away. The way to learn 
to love the highest is to continue to live as 
if one loved the highest. The way to 
banish evil feelings is constantly to refuse 
to coin them into deeds. 

Back of what we have said about know- 
ing and doing and feeling there has been 
a constant reference to moral standards, a 
recognition of good and evil, better and 
worse. This too is a part of human expe- 
rience. Perhaps it should be denominated 
the fourth significant fact about man. He 
does not discover the distinction between 
right and wrong. He comes to life with 
that written away in his nature. It is his 
moral equipment. He does make discov- 
eries as to what is right and what is wrong. 
Here there is distinction enough in different 

32 



MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES 



men. A man begins life with a sense that 
there are duties. He goes forth to dis- 
cover what they are. 

This lordship of the moral men all feel, 
but they do not all accept it. There are 
ethical rebels in plenty in the world. The 
fact is that there are just two kinds of 
moral differences among men. The first 
arises from the fact that some men are 
trying to do the right and others are not. 
The second arises from the fact that honest 
men differ in their conviction as to what 
particular things are right and wrong. The 
second kind of differences arise from the 
use of the judgment and may exist in men 
equally earnest. The first represents the 
fundamental moral cleavage among men. 

The consciousness of these various facts 
rushes in upon the preacher as he attempts 
to think about man. He gathers them up 
into a few intense convictions. Man has 
a complex life of infinite possibility. He 
can know with a constant increase of com- 
pleteness and adequacy. He can do with 
a kingly mastery of his deeds. He can 
feel with the whole circuit of the emotional 

33 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



life more and more mastered by the noblest 
things. His knowledge and activity and 
feelings are under the moral lordship of a 
great captain who cries "You ought" in 
the depths of his soul. 

These aspects of a man's life are crowned 
by another. Something in his nature — 
something as wide as human experience 
and as deep as the longings of the heart of 
man — cherishes a great desire to worship. 
Man's nature calls for God. In some 
great sense humanity calls for comradeship 
with the Most High. 

There are vague outreaches in the life of 
man, there are unquenchable thirsts, and 
unappeasable hungers, which can be satis- 
fied only when God is known in the in- 
timacy of personal fellowship. God has 
made us for himself, and our souls are 
restless until they find rest in him." 



34 



CHAPTER III 
THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 



CHAPTER III 

The Supreme Tragedy 

The preacher is sitting in his study at 
night. He feels drenched with the evil of 
the life of the man who has just left hLs 
house. He feels as if the man had left 
tracks of moral slime when he went away. 
The weariness of the day's work seems in 
some way to have departed. With brain 
moving with quick alertness and heart 
drawn by the passion and pain of it, the 
preacher sits staring at sin. Kindly half- 
truths and apologetic compromising state- 
ments stand out in their poor inadequacy. 
With a relentless moral candor and a stern 
realism, his mind demands the whole truth. 
So with the stinging sense of contact with 
its shamefulness and brutal reality, the 
preacher works out his theology of sin. 

His first feeling is a consciousness that 
the men who spoke and wrote the great 
passages of the Bible felt about sin as he 
feels now. He turns to the fifty-first psalm 
and reads over the passionate cry of a 
37 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



stricken soul appalled at its own sinfulness. 
There he finds something which completely 
corresponds to the feeling in his own heart, 
and with all the memories that psalm 
arouses, there is a personal quality to the 
repulsion and horror with which he draws 
back from the full picture of sin which 
is forming itself in his mind. It is not 
simply the foe of the man who has just 
gone from his presence. It is his foe too. 
And for a moment he seems to feel the 
hot breath of some beast of the forest 
against his face, so concrete has his thought 
become. 

There are some chemical reactions which 
are brought about only by the application 
of heat. You cannot think of sin calmly 
and at the same time think adequately. 
The heat of a mind alive to all its meaning 
is necessary for a man who would gain a 
true conception of sin. 

Of course it is necessary to make dis- 
tinctions. There is a difference between 
sin and evil, though the one often expresses 
itself in the form of the other. Sin is 
intentional wrongdoing. Evil is wrongdoing 
38 



THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 



whether it is intentional or not. Evil is 
often the result of heredity and environ- 
ment, and not of personal intention. Sin 
always has personal intention behind it. 

The Bowery child, brought up in an 
atmosphere of moral loathsomeness, does a 
great many evil things without knowing 
that they are evil. It is quite possible 
that he swears with no more understanding 
of its wrongness than the parrot who re- 
peats the oaths of a profane sailor. A 
great amount of the evil of the world is 
a crystallization of environment into the 
activity of the particular man. Perhaps 
some of the evil in the life of the depraved 
man who has just left the preacher's study 
was of this sort, but that was not the 
root of the man's condition. The preacher 
detected a slimy liking for evil in the man's 
eye, a certain foul at-homeness with vice, 
a certain leering personal intention which 
struck ice to his heart. If the man had 
been simply a victim, how easy it would 
have been to pity him! how easy it would 
have been to come close as a brother to 
help! But the citadel of the man's person- 
39 



THE THEOLOGY OE A PREACHER 



ality was wrong. He liked evil. He wanted 
evil. He disliked the discomfort which 
resulted from sin, but he was not at all 
alienated from sin itself. So the preacher 
faces the heart of the problem. Sin is 
personal commitment to evil. 

Classification, to be sure, is very difficult. 
A particular man, fairly suffocating with the 
atmosphere of vice he breathes, may have 
learned to hate it and be battling with all 
his strength against it. A man to whom 
environment and heredity have given every 
gift may be living a life of hard and cruel 
selfishness which is the very essence of sin. 
A man whose thought is much confused, in 
spite of the vices whose evil he does not 
understand, may be flinging himself in utter 
self-abandon out into the attempt to realize 
some ideal of courage or manhood which 
has, somehow, penetrated his mind. This 
is the heroism of the slums. A man who 
uses Christian phrases with facility may 
steadfastly refuse to face the moral mean- 
ing of some part of his life. This great 
refusal may brand him a particularly dan- 
gerous sort of sinner. Yes, classification is 
40 



THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 



difficult, but the main principles stand out 
clearly. 

The blighting tragedy of life is when a 
man turns from the good he knows to be 
good, to the evil he knows to be evil. The 
other tragedies which come from moral con- 
fusion and moral misconception are wide- 
spread enough, and are practically very 
great problems, but they can be dealt 
with by education. They can be dealt with 
by a changed environment. They can be 
dealt with by the ministry of a loving 
touch which makes moral truth concrete 
and clear and luminous. The preacher is 
ready to assist the social worker in every 
practical way in his dealing with the prob- 
lem of evil, but his own task is deeper. 
It is more fundamental. It is more dis- 
couraging. It has to do with the deepest 
heartache and agony of the world. It is 
the problem of sin. 

Somewhat impatiently the preacher thinks 
of those kindly and superficial students of 
life who bring forward true statements 
about some human experiences and insist 
that they cover all possible cases. The 
41 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



man with an imprisoned soul eager for 
nobility in spite of the mire of life in which 
he dwells has responded to their kindly 
ministries. He has blossomed out like a 
rich and fragrant flower. Then those who 
ministered to him say: "This is all there 
is of sin. The opportunity for good has 
been lacking. Give a man a good environ- 
ment and you will have a good man." 

The preacher thinks of one of the boys 
of his congregation. His home had a cer- 
tain glow of winsome purity. It was full 
of bright good cheer. It seemed as if 
good morals were a part of the air the boy 
breathed. Yet from all that he turned to 
devastating evil. With beautiful and loving 
tact his mother sought to restrain him. 
With a sad, kind sternness his father 
sought to turn him from his evil way. The 
very resources of friendly, eager, suffering 
love seemed exhausted in the endeavor to 
reach that boy. And in vain. He liked 
bad things. He wanted them. He chose 
them. He set his face steel-like against 
helpers and help. He deliberately allied 
himself with evil. 

42 



THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 



The preacher feels that he would like 
to bring this young man with his hard, 
inscrutable face, strong in its devotion to 
sin, to the apostles of the moral invinci- 
bility of a pure environment. Then he 
would like to say to them: "Look at this 
young man! What are you going to do 
with him ?" 

The preacher feels deep tenderness for 
all the misguided earnestness in the world; 
he knows the meaning of a true heart and 
a confused brain. Every true thing the 
modern theorists say about evil he accepts 
and has made use of again and again. 
He almost smiles as he thinks how often 
men deep of sympathy but slow of speech 
had acted on these principles before modern 
sociologists had announced them. His own 
social passion is as eager as theirs. But 
what they say, true as much of it is, simply 
ignores the most defining fact of all when 
they have not really faced the meaning of 
personal sin. 

It is a strange anomaly. It seems as 
if we might all be experts in the analysis 
of sin, for we all know what it is to look 
43 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



at a good thing and not like it and not 
want it. We all know what it is to look 
at an evil thing, to eve it with a subtle 
fascination, and to feel that we want it 
for ourselves. We all know that eruption 
of self-will in our feelings which makes 
everything seem hateful but our own way. 
W T e all know the inrush of that imperial 
self-consciousness which is ready to object 
even to God if he interferes with our per- 
sonal plans. We all know that inner 
anarchy which no tenderness of friends or 
beauty of environment can change. We 
all know the pang of a hot and restless 
heart which enshrines unreason and repulses 
control. All this is sin, sometimes coming 
in stately and alluring garb, sometimes 
coming with furtive eye and cautious step. 
It is the marshaling of the forces of self- 
will and evil desire against the higher 
lordship of righteousness and love. It is 
the lifting up of the flag of rebellion 
against the complete mastery of our lives 
by God. 

How we dislike to face these facts! How 
we cover them with felicitous and evasive 
44 



THE SUPREME TRAGEDY 



phrases! How easily we are misled by the 
lure of a phrase which hides a fallacy 
when that fallacy ministers to our comfort 
and to our content! With our scientific 
passion to face and be fair to all the facts 
of life, is it not strange in what fashion we 
have failed to face the fact of sin ? A 
botanist has never treated a flower or a 
weed as we treat this significant fact of 
life. He does not try to change the flower 
to make it fit some previous classification. 
He enlarges his classification to make it 
fit the flower. The matter of sin is the 
one matter in which modern thinkers have 
been conspicuously unscientific. 

The preacher goes back in thought to 
the man who left him an hour ago. He 
goes out into his wide and varied experience 
in dealing eye to eye and heart to heart 
with men. He goes in thought to the vital 
and relentlessly honest portraits of men in 
the world's literature. He sees in graphic 
vision the struggling men who walk through 
the pages of the Bible. He goes into the 
most rebellious memories in his own mind 
and heart. A strange, deep, brooding, sad, 
45 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



infinitely honest look comes into his eyes. 
As he kneels by his study chair in prayer 
he utters some great words: 

"Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, 
And done that which is evil in thy sight." 



46 



CHAPTER IV 
THE PLACE OF CHRIST 



CHAPTER IV 

The Place of Christ 

The preacher did not first meet Christ in 
the Gospels. He saw him first looking out 
of the eyes of some man who was inspired 
by the spirit of Jesus and eagerly striving 
to live according to his will, a man who 
knew the meaning of the companionship 
of Christ as well as loyal obedience to his 
behests. He first knew that Jesus could 
master men because he met men whom 
he had mastered. He remembers with a 
certain gladness the touch of these lives 
of deep, real piety upon his own. They 
gave him his first definition of religion. 

Then came the Gospels. Their words 
had long been familiar. The fine cadence 
of their simple, noble speech had rung in 
upon his mind from childhood. The old 
sentences often sound in his ears with a 
turn of emphasis, a deep tone of roused 
feeling, which comes from their utterance 
years ago by those whose very tones were 
the first important matter in his education. 
49 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



But the time came when he discovered the 
Gospels for himself. They sounded out 
their message to him in the terms of his 
own thought and study. He had brought 
his own life, with its anxious intensity of 
mind and its passionate moral struggles, to 
the Gospels and then they spoke to him 
their deepest word. 

His first discovery was about Jesus. He 
could not content himself after this by 
saying that the Gospels tell about Jesus. 
He felt that he must say that Jesus lives 
in the Gospels, Jesus speaks in the Gospels, 
Jesus walks through the Gospels, and they 
do not imprison him; for he can walk right 
out of the Gospels into men's lives. 

Following the pages of the Xew Testa- 
ment narrative, the preacher has watched 
Jesus in his dealings with men. There 
was a secret of fascination in the person- 
ality of Jesus. That was evident from the 
first. He captured men. He awoke their 
interest. He secured their deep devotion. 
He mastered their lives. Simply living 
among men his great human life, he be- 
came the central figure in every group 
50 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 



where he was. the dominant influence, the 
potent personality. 

The vivid winning humanity of Jesus 
was an outstanding impression made upon 
the preacher as he studied the portrait of 
Christ in the Gospels. How he would have 
liked to be with the twelve on those Ions; 
walks as they went about in Judaea and 
Galilee! How he would have liked to be 
one of the group in the evening camp 
out under the silent, shining stars! How 
he would have liked to watch the way 
in which some deep tiling in the lives of 
men and women leaped to respond to the 
summons of the eyes of Jesus! How he 
would have liked to feel the pressure of 
that strong brother man's hand upon his 
own ! 

This sense of the actual human expe- 
rience of Jesus is deepened as he reads 
the story of the temptations. He watches 
Jesus under the influence of a mighty 
spiritual enthusiasm which carries him with- 
out food and without hunger for many days. 
Then comes the desperate reaction. The 
high glow of the rich enthusiasm fades. 
51 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

The life comes back from the spiritual 
heights to the C major of common expe- 
rience. Then the voice of the body is 
heard. Hunger calls. It cries out. It be- 
comes intense and torturing in its call. 
All the need of the body, all the desire of 
the body seem to focus into one intense 
demand for bread. Let Jesus perform a 
miracle and feed himself. Even in the 
moment of intense physical reaction and 
longing Jesus recognizes all this as a tempta- 
tion. Very simply the matter can be put. 
This is the question involved: Is he to be 
master of his body or is his body to be 
master of him ? And with mighty spiritual 
power he thrusts aside the temptation, fill- 
ing his mind with a great Old Testament 
word. Jesus was bitterly tempted, but he 
was always stronger than physical desire. 

Before Jesus there came a vision of his 
work. It was a glittering vision. It pre- 
sented the world at his feet and him as 
its victorious ruler. It revealed him master 
of all men and master of all human insti- 
tutions. It was very alluring and very 
beautiful, but it ignored the fundamental 
52 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 



moral problem of the world. It ignored 
the necessity of a great price of pain being 
paid for the moral mastery of the world. 
The king it revealed was king of the bodies 
of men; they found it necessary to obey 
his behests; but he was not king of the 
souls of men. He had not won their deep 
devotion or transformed their lives. He was 
the external ruler of unmastered hearts. 
Without a passion of moral suffering Jesus 
could become the world's ruler. Only by 
walking the path of infinite pain could he 
become the world's Saviour. With imperial 
strength Jesus banished the picture of an 
unwounded king for the other picture of 
a Saviour with a pierced heart. 

The full weight of his days of ecstasy 
and his abstinence from food was coming 
upon him. Nerves held tense and high for 
long began to rebel. The awful battle 
which the most highly strung and gifted 
and sensitive natures know became his. He 
fought like a giant with, powerful over- 
wrought nerves. He seemed to be on the 
pinnacle of the temple pressed by a wild 
desire to cast himself down. Of course the 
53 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



heavenly Father would save him. The 
abnormal — the battle of millions of men — 
faced him and seemed about to master him. 
But in the very moment of his physical 
and spiritual weariness Jesus held himself 
in stern self-mastery. He maintained his 
poise when overwrought nerves clamored 
the loudest. He threaded his way steadily 
among the live wires of mutinous nerves, 
and was complete monarch of his life in 
this strange, dangerous hour. 

Following the life of Jesus from the days 
of the great temptation, one impression 
stands out more and more clearly: Jesus 
not only fought, but he always won. He 
was like all other men in knowing the 
battle of life; he was unlike all other men 
in never knowing defeat. A certain radiant 
spotlessness characterized all his life. It 
was not the pale and colorless perfection 
of mere freedom from wrongdoing. It was 
the rich and glowing perfection of words 
and deeds vibrant and adequate to the need 
and the demand of every hour. There was 
a beautiful attractiveness about this sinless 
life. Mere correctness repels men. This 
54 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 



passionate perfection of full and glowing 
life draws all the world. 

With all the winsome brotherliness of the 
life of Jesus there is a regal quality to his 
movement as he walks through the Gospels 
which cannot escape our notice. He has 
the dignity and the assured confidence of 
a king. It is very quiet, very deep in his 
life, and quite unfathomably steady. You 
feel at once that here is a life born for 
mastery, and the territory of that mastery 
enlarges in your thought until nothing is 
excluded from it. 

The sense of perfect purity and the sense 
of kingliness Jesus rouses in the vital stu- 
dent of his life make the miracles and the 
resurrection seem very natural. They are 
just what you would expect — of him. You 
can never judge them by themselves. You 
can never think of them by themselves. 
They are a part of a total life, in which 
they fit so perfectly that, so seen, you do 
not hesitate to accept them. 

So you are brought to the place where 
you are ready to hear the great words of 
Jesus when he claims to have the power 
55 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



to forgive sin. It is an astounding claim. 
It would make you turn in horror from any- 
other man. But with your mind sharpened 
by the contemplation of his words, your 
heart warm with the thought of his life 
and deeds, your conscience calling in some 
dim way for such a word as he claimed 
the power to speak, all becomes clear. He 
did have the power to forgive sin. The 
word the world most needed to hear he 
was able to speak. From this winsome, 
spotless, kingly life the words of forgiveness 
have a right to come. 

Standing back and thinking of it all to- 
gether, you try to find a way to describe 
adequately this great, unique Person of 
whom you find it necessary to believe such 
wonderful things. There is only one word 
great enough to describe him. You look 
squarely at the meaning of that word. You 
look fully at the portrait of Jesus in the 
Gospels. Then you hesitate no longer. 
You use the great word of him. You call 
him God. 

Did the disciples feel the wonder of this 
life, of these words and deeds as you feel 
56 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 

it? Again you go back to the Gospels. 
You watch the companions of Jesus as they 
follow him with growing wonder. He did 
not tell them who he was. He waited until 
they could tell him. He simply let them 
hear his words and watch his deeds. Day 
by day and month by month the impression 
grew. At last the disciples were on a quest 
for a word great enough to describe him. 
"Teacher" would not do. He was so great 
you could not get the meaning of his life 
inside that word. "Prophet" would not do. 
That word was too small for the significance 
of his life. At Csesarea Philippi Peter was 
ready. He had found a word. He called 
Jesus the Son of God. 

With us, as with the disciples, the road 
to the acceptance of the deity of Jesus is 
to open the life to the whole impression he 
makes upon us. Larger and larger this 
personality then grows until only one word 
is great enough to describe him. The 
Church has never been able to rest with- 
out this great word when it has spoken of 
Jesus. The testimony of the Christian 
centuries is that to feel the full impact of 
57 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



his life involves the necessity of calling 
him God. 

But to realize it fully — this the preacher 
well knows — a man must come with his 
own failures, his own struggle, his own 
outreach. It is as he studies Jesus in the 
light of these that he comes really to under- 
stand him. There is a moral as well as a 
mental element in the acceptance of the 
deity of Jesus, and, indeed, an emotional 
and volitional element too. It is as the 
whole man — mind, conscience, heart, and 
will — feels the meaning of the whole life 
of Jesus that a vital sense of his signifi- 
cance is really attained. Then it is that, 
shining bright and clear, the doctrine of the 
deity of Christ becomes one of the most 
certain facts of life. 

Thinking thus, the preacher finds a 
mighty moral tonic moving through his 
life. With the Son of God as the center 
of his message he can face his problems, 
he can face the evil of the world, he can 
face the need of men. He dares to be a 
preacher because he has the Divine Christ. 



58 



CHAPTER V 
THE DEED OX CALVARY 



CHAPTER V 

The Deed on Calvary 

There is a perennial fascination about 
the cross. It attracts all sorts of people. 
It speaks to all types of minds. Its appeal 
is as manifold as human experience. It 
remains vital in every century, and is con- 
stantly relating itself in a surprising fashion 
to new and difficult problems which come 
fresh with the life of another age. 

Calvary may be understood by any man 
anywhere as a revelation of heroism. Here 
was a man who went the full length in 
loyalty to his convictions. He did not 
merely risk life. He gave life, sealing the 
steadfastness of his purpose. When hos- 
tility began to close in upon him, he re- 
sorted to no indirection or subtle evasion 
or questionable compromise to save himself. 
He went on in the path of faithfulness with 
set face, and when faithfulness led to a 
cross he accepted even that. Calvary is 
rich in the quality of moral heroism. It is 
a sanctuary of high inspiration to moral 
61 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



stragglers who are tempted to give up 
the fight. 

The cross can be understood without 
difficulty as a revelation of faith. Jesus 
believed that his death would elicit a great 
response. He believed that it would be- 
come a moral power. He trusted the future. 
He trusted the moral responsiveness of men. 
When there was least responsiveness and 
most misinterpretation he boldly undertook 
the great adventure. He gave his life. 
That would rouse men. That would stir 
their sluggish consciences. What they had 
not been able to learn from his deeds or 
his words they would learn from his death. 
He was so sure of it that he took the risk. 
He believed in men. His death is a creator 
of moral faith in humanity. 

The cross can easily be felt as a revela- 
tion of love. Jesus had courage enough 
to die. He had faith enough to make it 
clear that it was worth while to die. He 
had love enough to be willing to die. 
He so loved that he gave. The whole 
atmosphere of the life of Jesus is full of 
love. His death is a climax of love. In 

62 



THE DEED ON CALVARY 



him love ceases to be a sentiment. It be- 
comes a compelling motive for action. 
Many men have played with love. Many 
men have discarded it when it made great 
demands. Jesus took love seriously. He 
put it in command of his life. At last it 
nailed him to the cross. His death is a 
great revelation of love enthroned. 

Now, it is not hard to see that all this 
courage and faith and love must become 
a power in the life of men. Whatever an 
earnest man's view of the person of Christ, 
he cannot believe that Calvary counts for 
nothing in the life of the world. It has 
created courage. It has created faith. It 
has created love. What it reveals, it makes 
potent in the lives of men. It is a moral 
and spiritual dynamic in the life of the race. 

When a man approaches Calvary with a 
deep appreciation of the uniqueness of the 
person of Christ, when he bows before him 
with a vital sense that he was very God 
as well as very man, new meanings emerge. 
Now he sees that the cross does not simply 
mean that a man once had triumphant 
faith and self-giving love. It means that 
63 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



God believed in humanity. It means that 
God had infinite self-giving love. 

Life is now lifted into transcendent sig- 
nificance. If God believes in humanity, 
how dare we doubt ? If God so loves that 
only the gift of the cross could reveal the 
depth of his devotion, how regal a place love 
has at the heart of the universe! Faith 
and love have become transfigured. The 
doubter and the cynic are left without 
standing room in the system of things, for 
God believes and God loves, and such 
belief and love become a great rebuke of 
all men's moral failure. To fall short of 
a high moral standard is always a tragedy; 
but to be faithless when God believes in 
us, to be loveless in the face of such self- 
giving devotion — that were treachery and 
abasement indeed. 

So Calvary becomes morally creative in 
a sense impossible before. If the Son of 
God so gave himself, that great sacrifice 
becomes such a power to set moving all 
high motives and righteous purposes as the 
death of no human hero could ever be. 
Calvary breaks through selfishness and finds 

64 



THE DEED ON CALVARY 



responsive love. It kindles a fire of no- 
bility in hearts cold and heavy with evil. 

Thus the vital appropriation of the doc- 
trine of the deity of Christ absolutely 
transforms the meaning of the cross. It 
changes its practical results. It enshrines 
it in the mind and the heart and the will 
as it could be enshrined in no other way. 

When a man comes to the cross with 
a vigorous moral sensitiveness further mean- 
ings emerge. To the man with conscience 
awake, sin is never a matter which can be 
treated lightly or taken as a matter of 
course. Righteousness is regal and can 
never be treated as a slave. The life of 
men is a vast tangle of sin and evil, and 
something must be done about that evil. 
Righteousness is alive in the life of God, 
and with all his love he must be loyal 
to that white flame of moral passion which 
burns forever in his heart. There are vast 
interests of righteousness to be guarded 
and cared for, and the God who is Master 
and Ruler of all must care for righteous- 
ness in all the vast reaches of the life 
which he has made. 

65 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



When the supremacy of the moral dawns 
upon a man, he begins to see far deeper 
meaning in the cross. It is more than the 
memory of a man of courage and faith 
and love. It is more than the Son of 
God revealing the Father's belief in hu- 
manity and his undying love for the children 
of men. It has critical moral significance. 
It is the solution of a moral problem. God so 
cared for righteousness that it was nec- 
essary for God's Son to suffer all the 
tragedy — all the inner tragedy — of Calvary 
before sin could be forgiven. Calvary is 
a great deed honoring righteousness. It is 
not an evasion of moral demand; it is a 
satisfaction of moral demand. 

There is no moral carelessness in the life 
of God. To all sentient creatures of all 
ages the cross stands as a symbol of the 
supremacy of the moral. It is a vindica- 
tion of God's care for righteousness as well 
as a revelation of his love. On the cross 
you see the depths of God's care for that 
moral ideal which men have dethroned. 
It is a revelation of the conscience of God. 

This looking upon the cross from the 
66 



THE DEED ON CALVARY 

standpoint of its moral significance is by 
no means exhausted when we have come 
as far as we have now journeyed. When 
a man's moral discernment is completely 
penetrating he looks to find more meaning 
yet in Calvary. That stinging, lashing 
conscience of his has been somewhat ap- 
peased by the thought of Calvary as the 
revealer and vindicator of the Eternal Con- 
science in the life of God, but it wants 
more. It still beats restlessly. If there 
is one spot in a man's experience where 
he cannot be coutented with less than entire 
reality, it is when his conscience is relent- 
lessly and morally awake. A voice deep 
within him calls for something deeper yet 
in the great sacrifice. And immediately it 
becomes evident that the apostolic inter- 
pretation found something yet deeper in 
the cross. The phrases, "a sin-bearer," 
"who himself bare our sins in his body 
upon the tree," "a propitiation for our 
sins," strike a profounder ethical note than 
we have yet struck. They may be figures, 
but they represent something deeper than 
a winning moral influence or the revelation 
67 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



and vindication of a ruler of righteous 
passion. 

At this point we must carefully guard 
ourselves from all crass and mechanical 
interpretations. We cannot make the cross 
a cold matter of commercial exchange. 
We cannot descend to unethical theological 
brutality in order to satisfy an ethical 
hunger. But we must affirm, and with 
right fearless emphasis, that in some deep 
and adequate fashion Christ did take our 
load upon him, that in a real and spiritual 
experience he bore the penalty for our 
sins. "The chastisement of our peace 
was upon him; and with his stripes we 
are healed." 

Whatever the various elements of the 
ultimate rationale of the atonement, this 
must be insisted upon. There are a hunger 
and a need in the life completely awake 
morally, which are satisfied only by the con- 
ception of a sin-bearer. And in our fear 
of unethical theories we must not run 
away from the central moral and spiritual 
verity of the cross — the fact that Christ 
did there in some genuine fashion bear the 
68 



THE DEED ON CALVARY 



weight of the burden of the world's sin 
and so made possible its forgiveness. 

There is no conception which, when 
totally appropriated, so gives rest to a con- 
science heavy with the sense of guilt, none 
which proves so morally creative, nor about 
which all the energies of the new life can 
be so effectively organized, as this of the 
death of Christ as the achievement of our 
peace through the taking upon himself of 
our responsibilities. 

When the sinful man can stand in the 
presence of the cross and feel that there 
the Son of God has actually solved his 
problem, has actually borne his burden, has 
actually made his woeful weight his own, 
and thus made possible the forgiveness of 
his sins, a great glorious sun of hope rises 
over his life and a great song of rapture 
is ready to sing itself in his soul. 

We must be extremely careful to keep 
in our theology of the cross the secret of 
the cross's power. And at this point no 
one must be more careful than the preacher- 
theologian. He may say beautiful and true 
things about Calvary without ever striking 
69 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



its distinctive message. The Jesus who is 
a man of courage and faith and love will 
inspire men. This much at least many a 
Unitarian has in his gospel of the cross. 
The message of the Son of God, who 
revealed the confidence of God in humanity 
and the love which God felt for his erring 
children, when preached with enthusiasm, 
will rouse men and give them new passion 
and new high purposefulness. The mes- 
sage of Calvary as the revealer and vindi- 
cator of God's righteousness will produce 
a moral fiber in the Church. But the full 
message of the Son of God as a sin-bearer, 
bending under the weight of the burden 
of men's sins — this alone goes to the root 
of men's need, satisfies the conscience, and 
becomes completely creative as a moral 
power in the life. 

Calvary, then, is a great deed. It is a 
deed of suffering rescue. It is a deed of 
sin-bearing. So interpreted it is the moral 
center of religion. It is the citadel of 
Christian experience. It is the really defin- 
ing thing about the Christian faith. 

The preacher to whom this great truth 
70 



THE DEED ON CALVARY 



has become vital, can recognize and rejoice 
in a hundred other true and beautiful things 
about Calvary. But he knows that tins is 
the supreme truth, the one which eternally 
matters. 

When he confronts a man with a sense 
of blighting and devastating sin, with the 
lash of conscience goading him like a pur- 
suing despair, he knows that only one word 
will go to the root of that man's woe. 
Calvary as the experience of a human hero 
will not touch his need. Calvary as the 
revelation of the love of God will rouse 
him, but it will not satisfy him. Calvary 
as the deed of a divine sin-bearer will 
give him everlasting peace. 



71 



CHAPTER VI 
SALVATION 



CHAPTER VI 

Salvation 

There were many roads which led to 
Rome. There are many paths which 
lead to the experience of salvation. There 
are strange windings and turnings, sudden 
ascents and ways through deep valleys, 
among the varied experiences through which 
men come at last to the peace of God. 

We may make some observations about 
the various places where men touch the 
deeper demand and the way in which they 
follow it, and try at last to see what is 
involved in a full and typical Christian 
experience. 

Here is a careless man. He is a man 
of exuberant physical health, and a hearty, 
intense bodily enjoyment of life. He goes 
swinging through the days, robust and full- 
blooded, a well-fed, well-kept, contented 
animal. If he were just a horse or a dog, 
that is all we would require of him. But 
hidden in his own life there is a demand 
waiting to make itself heard. In his heart 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



there is a voice which will one day speak. 
There is a turn of the road somewhere, a 
new angle of experience met, and so con- 
science springs forth full grown with its 
imperial demand. 

Here is a man held tight in the clutches 
of some favorite vice. Year by year its 
grasp becomes firmer and stronger. For 
awhile he lives on scarcely thinking of the 
dualism of his life or the slavery which 
is staring him in the face. He is busy 
most of the time with the constant de- 
mands of a full, and it may be arduous, life. 
Occasionally comes the gnawing hunger for 
indulgence and the lapse from the every- 
day line of his activity. Then at last he 
wakes up to the meaning of it all. His 
whole life is being dragged down to the 
level of his lowest indulgence. The brute 
is devouring the man. In the agony of 
this realization he reaches out for help. 

Here is a man who has taken human 
experience just as it has come and without 
asking any questions. He is fast becom- 
ing an efficient commercial machine. He 
is practically alert, shrewd, preoccupied with 

76 



SALVATION 



affairs, and the voice of heart and con- 
science seem little heard in his life. But 
a fragment of a man cannot take up all 
the room in his experience without a strug- 
gle. Sooner or later the man of affairs 
hears a demand from a realm far different 
from his country of stocks and bonds. He 
faces issues he hardly knew to exist before. 
The call of the upper country rings in 
his ears. It is his day in the valley of 
decision. 

Here is a man of full-orbed selfishness, 
living a life correct enough but very cold 
and calculating. He holds the reins of his 
life with a firm hand. The spirited steeds 
of his desires never get away from him. 
He is proud of his self-mastery. The 
hard, corroding currents of selfishness course 
through his veins unheeded. But the day 
comes when he makes a strange discovery. 
He had supposed that vice was sin. He 
learns that selfishness is sin as well. He 
examines his complacent, well-kept life and 
sees the poison of calculating selfishness 
everywhere. He goes into his plain of 
conflict, and if the victory is on the side 
77 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



of the higher forces of his nature, he ends 
by crying out, 4 4 God be merciful to me 
a sinner." 

Here is a man with a high ideal. He 
is always pursuing it. He is seeking the 
place where its rainbow colors touch the 
earth. He spends days and days in the 
quest. But it always eludes him. At last, 
footsore and weary and discouraged, he 
sits thinking over the sad tale of his failure. 
Then it comes to him that he must find 
a helper, if he is ever to succeed. And the 
moment when he begins to seek for a 
helper from whom he can receive the power 
to do what he so much desires, a new day 
has come in his life. 

Now, in the various times of crisis which 
come to men as the higher demand breaks 
upon them, there is likely to be an em- 
phasis on one of two aspects. One is the 
need of a satisfactory life, one is the long- 
ing for fellowship with God. One is a moral 
hunger, the other is a spiritual desire. One 
results in ethical passion, the other calls at 
once for religion. 

When what a man desires is contact and 
78 



SALVATION 



fellowship with the Unseen, when he sets 
out on a quest for comradeship with God, 
he is on the way to a religious experience. 
There is a great deal of religious expe- 
rience in the world which is not Christian 
experience. Whenever a man looking up 
at the immensities of the night above him 
reaches out in deep self-giving and trust 
there will come to him a vague, beautiful 
sense of being at home in the universe. 
^Yhenever a man opens his life to the cur- 
rents which play in upon his soul from 
without, a sense of being part of a great, 
full, rich organism of life will come to 
him. This is the source of the mysticism 
in many a religion. It tends to crystallize 
on the intellectual side into a pantheistic 
philosophy. It is as full of poetry as all 
the beauty of nature, and as subtle and 
as deep as the dim, vague longings of men. 
It is a religious acceptance of the uni- 
verse, a homelike restfulness in the great 
mystery without, which has such strange 
kinship with the mystery within. 

This type of religious experience is likely 
to be lacking in ethical quality, and may 
79 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



in certain temperaments easily degenerate 
into sheer sensuous indulgence. It is the 
voice of one aspect of the life and not an 
answer to its total need. 

When the crisis in a man's life is of a 
distinctly moral character the outcome is 
along different lines. The sense of failure 
and guilt and need is like the stabbing of 
sharp swords. The outreach becomes a 
quest for a religion, but the man is not 
looking for a comrade so much as a Saviour. 
He is not looking for a tender, mystical 
consciousness of oneness with all the deep 
life of things, so much as he is looking 
for the forgiveness of his sins. The inten- 
sity of his moral struggle gives him insight. 
The lash of his conscience frees him from 
the danger of self-deception. He will be 
glad to have all the rich and subtle and won- 
derful things which religion will ultimately 
offer. But what he must have is peace 
in spite of a sinful past. What he must 
have is deliverance from the evil winch he 
cannot throw away from his life. What 
he must have is cleansed purposes, renewed 
life, and free access to a God who is not 

80 



SALVATION 



only the Infinite Soul of things but is 
Righteousness alive. 

Such a man can be satisfied with nothing 
less than a divine Christ. He can rest 
contented in no smaller solution of the 
awful problem of his sin than the deed on 
Calvary which made possible its forgive- 
ness. There is a certain amazing corre- 
spondence between his need and the divine 
Christ who calls to him from the cross. 
Here is a deed which in all its spiritual 
agony has, somehow, caught the full ethical 
horror of his moral failure. He is told 
that this deed satisfies God, that sin can 
be forgiven. He does not have a phi- 
losophy of it. He would be at a loss to give 
a rationale of it. But some deep sense of 
the eternal fitness of things makes him feel 
that it is true. He decides to accept the 
great sacrifice. He decides to trust the 
divine Saviour. He takes a great leap of 
personal surrender, and self-giving, and 
dependence, and faith. He flings himself 
away forever into the arms of Christ. It is 
the greatest and completest personal act of 
his life. It is the moment of his conversion. 
81 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



And in upon the man thus giving him- 
self in personal commitment there comes a 
divine response. The intensity of it will 
vary according to the temperament of the 
man, but the meaning of it is always the 
same. Whether it is a cataclysmic upheaval 
of resounding joy, or the deep, still flow 
of a pervasive, calm peace, this is the heart 
of it: the Son of God will take care of him. 
He has accepted him. His sins are for- 
given. All is well. He can look straight up 
into the eyes of God and be at peace. 

Moving through all this joy of a dawn- 
ing Christian experience there is a surging 
moral urgency. Peace has not come in 
such a way as to lessen moral demand. 
It does not lower the tone of the man's 
ethical life. It is a moral peace which 
sets him to work more eagerly than ever 
before, to obey the behests of righteousness. 
Only now he is not depending upon him- 
self. Now he is depending on Christ. At 
one instant his Christian experience satis- 
fies moral demand and makes him more 
eager about all moral things. It gives him 
rest without arrogant presumption, and zest 
82 



SALVATION 



in moral tasks without the temptation to 
become a Pharisee. 

This is the experience of peace with God 
through our Lord Jesus Christ. It centers 
in the great sacrificial deed of Christ. It 
goes out with a vitalized manhood to 
attack all the great tasks of life. Is there 
the labor of reform ? Are there battles 
for the realization of brotherhood? Are 
there wrongs to right and higher rights to 
be recognized? There is no equipment for 
these tasks like the vitalizing breath of a 
Christian experience. 

And in all these tasks the man who has 
found moral peace will remember that the 
same peace is the deepest need of other 
men. He will be eager for the sanitation 
of the slums. He will be even more eager 
for the salvation of the men of the slums. 
His trust in the Christ of the cross has set 
free such divine energies in his life that he 
knows that in such an experience is to be 
found the staying strength which is to keep 
men faithful and make them finally vic- 
torious in the moral and social battles of 
the world. 

83 



CHAPTER VII 
THE GOAL OF SAINTHOOD 



CHAPTER VII 

The Goal of Sainthood 

We have been thinking about the begin- 
ning of the Christian life. Now we are 
to think about its goal; or, to be more 
exact, we are to think about one of its 
goals. It has a goal for the individual 
and a goal for society. It has a goal as 
regards personal experience and a goal as 
regards the relating of this experience to 
every real and true thing in individual and 
corporate life. The goal directly along the 
line of the developing Christian experience 
is the goal of sainthood. It is of that 
goal, and the ways leading to it, of which 
we are now to think. 

When a man actually begins the Chris- 
tian life he has found two things. He has 
a new allegiance and a new enthusiasm. 
He endeavors to be faithful to the allegiance 
and to express the enthusiasm. The alle- 
giance is to Jesus Christ his Saviour. The 
enthusiasm is the fire of love which was 
kindled in his heart when he accepted Christ. 
87 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

Now the history of a typical Christian is 
a story of alternating emphasis. Sometimes 
it is the allegiance which is in command. 
A man does some things with an intense 
purpose of loyalty to his Saviour. He does 
them without much emotion. But he be- 
lieves they represent Christ's will for him, 
and he sets his face flintlike to do them. 
Sometimes the enthusiasm is in command. 
There are some things which a man does 
in a glad, spontaneous devotion which fills 
his heart with music. He so loves Christ 
that he pours his affection out in eager 
deeds of service. 

Just after a man's conversion — especially 
when the conversion has been characterized 
by a great emotional upheaval — the second 
type of activity, where creative Christian 
enthusiasm is in command of the life, is 
likely to be seen. But sooner or later the 
glow of rapture somehow slips out of the 
consciousness and the man finds his life 
an expression of personal allegiance rather 
than of uprushing enthusiasm. To be sure, 
the emotion returns. Many and many a 
time a man's hands spring to his task in 
88 



THE GOAL OF SAINTHOOD 



spontaneous gladness. Many and many a 
time words leap to his lips brimming with 
warm feeling fresh from his heart. But 
there are also many times when he has 
no particular emotion. And there are also 
times when his Christian activity is the 
driven loyalty of a set will, with no re- 
sponse in feeling at all, or with the feelings, 
like wild horses, all pulling the other way. 

Now, both these types of emphasis are 
Christian. The man the basis of whose 
life is allegiance to Christ and the man 
the basis of whose activity is bubbling 
Christian devotion are both men of true 
Christian life. But the way of uninspired 
allegiance is a way of drudgery. It is a 
way of slavery. The way of warm enthu- 
siasm is morally and spiritually creative. 
The life moves along with a triumphant 
swing of power. Christian living seems 
set to music. 

As a man thinks of his past Christian 
experience he dwells upon his days of 
spontaneous enthusiasm rather than his days 
of driven loyalty. He delights to remember 
the days and nights when an inner light 
89 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



seemed shining in his heart and an inner 
fire warmed all his life. He knows that then 
his words and deeds, fashioned according 
to the power of an inner inspiration, had 
a Christian richness unknown at other times. 

About this difference in emphasis in 
Christian living there are one or two prac- 
tical things to say. First of all, we cannot 
get away from the fact that we have a 
physical life. There are bodily reactions, 
complex and varied performances of the 
nerves, states of mind which are the shadow 
of physical states, and these must not be 
confused with real indications of our spir- 
itual states. Then it is also true that it 
would not be wholesome for any man to 
live at white heat all the while. More than 
that, it would be quite impossible to do 
so. There is a kind of sentimental inade- 
quacy which creeps into the Christian life 
when there is too much emphasis on the 
emotions. 

But while all this is true, it must be 
added that the days kindled by high Chris- 
tian enthusiasm represent a state of grace 
higher than those characterized by the dull 
90 



THE GOAL OF SAINTHOOD 



drudgery of driven loyalty. A man instinc- 
tively feels that it is more normal to obey 
Christ because he loves to do his will than 
to obey him because he ought to do it. 

The goal of the Christian life is the 
period when days of loyalty have ceased to 
alternate with days of love, and all a man's 
life is dominated by the love of Christ. 
This is personal sainthood. It does not 
mean a perpetual high tide of emotions. 
Sometimes the feelings are as quiet as a 
lake in the moonlight on a summer's night. 
But even then there is a certain spiritual 
depth to the life which is different from 
a deed of driven loyalty. The activity is 
not the activity of conscious emotion, but 
it is the activity of love. Then, again, 
the flood gates of feeling open and a great 
consciousness of God's presence sweeps over 
the life. The deeds surge with the dynamic 
of a wonderful gladness surging through 
them. Love is now not only deep in the 
motive but possessingly present in the con- 
sciousness. Sometimes there are physical 
reactions and dire conflicts with nerves, 
but this storm on the surface of the ocean 
91 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



leaves the depths untouched. The saint 
personally experiences the ocean of the love 
of God. 

When we come to analyze closely we 
find that sainthood includes some further 
characteristics. 

First. There is a certain ethereal purity 
of purpose. The saint's judgment may be 
confused. He may become perplexed and 
ignorantly fight on the wrong side in some 
great conflict, he may make all sorts of 
intellectual and practical mistakes, but his 
intention is nobly right, and this glori- 
fied rightness of intention tends to make 
his mind do the very best and most depend- 
able work of which his mind is capable. 

Second. He not only is filled with love 
to God and Christ, but he is filled with 
love to his fellow men. There is a certain 
deep personal responsiveness to human need 
which is a far finer thing than the zestful 
endeavor to be useful at the beginning of 
the Christian life. Training, environment, 
and other matters may interpose obstacles 
even now, but the heart has a deep hos- 
pitality for all human need. 

92 



THE GOAL OF SAINTHOOD 



Third. There is a constantly growing 
sense of the reality of the things of the 
spirit. God and Christ and the Spirit's 
work have a certain conscious and con- 
stant validity. They have become the most 
real and possessing matters in all the 
world. 

Fourth. Deep in the life there is a steady 
and perennial drawing of energy from trust 
in Christ. The life has a great song of 
victory in it — the victory of a constant 
trust. Sainthood is not something with 
which the Saviour and his great sacrifice are 
remotely connected. It is the highest spir- 
itual gift of the cross of Christ. 

Most Christians have known what it is 
to have snatches of the experience of saint- 
hood. They remember all their lives the 
glow and wonder of the experience. It 
gives them a standard and an inspiration 
which are of untold value. But Christ 
came not that people might have glimpses of 
sainthood, and that a few elect souls might 
achieve its permanent glory. He came that 
all his children might attain to that life 
where loyalty is lost in love, where a per- 
93 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



feet motive and a full devotion crown all 
the days. It may be a far call to these 
heights, but it is toward these heights we 
are climbing. 

If we ask how we shall know the way, 
there may be many things which are ob- 
scure, but there are some things which are 
clear. The deeper the consecration of a 
human life, the more it is really opened 
to the mighty work of the Saviour. Surely 
complete consecration is a door through 
which one must pass on his journey to this 
promised land. Then the deeper the real- 
ization that all spiritual grace is the gift of 
God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
more in a subtle way is the life attuned 
to true receptiveness. The more a man 
fills his mind and heart with the thought 
of the creative grace of God, the more 
will it become feasible for God to do great 
things for him. And added to consecration 
and an appreciative waiting for God's great 
gifts there must surely be deep desire. A 
high discontent with less than the best God 
has to give must help to open the doors to 
the best. Blessed are all they who hunger 

94 



THE GOAL OF SAINTHOOD 



and thirst after sainthood, for the desire 
is a prophecy of the fulfillment. 

So, giving ourselves more completely, 
believing in God's grace more deeply, aspir- 
ing with great personal longing for the 
triumph of love, we may work and wait 
and trust, and the God who desires to lead 
us each to the place of fullest Christian 
devotion will in his own way lead us to 
the heights of life. 

It may well be that the man who has 
reached the table-lands of peace and love 
will be thinking little about what he has at- 
tained. God delights to deliver his children 
from self-conscious sainthood. The dweller 
on the heights is likely to be too much pre- 
occupied with the love of Christ to have 
much time to think of himself. He is still 
pressing on, loving, growing, serving, pass- 
ing into larger life and fuller experience 
all his days. 



95 



CHAPTER VHI 



A CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AND 
THE REST OF A MAN'S LIFE 



CHAPTER VIII 



A Christian Experience and the 
Rest of a Man's Life 

A Christian experience may become the 
dominant fact in a man's life. But it is 
not the only fact in his life. There are 
all sorts of other experiences and activities 
to which it must be related. The test of 
the wholesomeness and adequacy of a 
Christian experience is the way in which 
it organizes the rest of a man's life about it. 

Sometimes it does not come to the 
position of dominance. It is a real and 
wonderful fact, but it dwells in its own 
apartment in the life, so to speak, and does 
not particularly care to associate with its 
neighbors. In this fashion a fatal dualism 
is introduced. The inspiration of religion 
becomes a sort of spiritual intoxication 
which is never related to any particular 
activity. And the active life sinks to a 
low level, lacking the inspiration and guid- 
ance which the Christian experience ought 
to give. It is only by becoming a motor 
99 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



power that Christian experience is kept 
completely wholesome. Religious feeling 
becomes at last a vicious emotional make- 
believe unless it masters the rest of the life. 

So the task of the man who has found 
peace with God through our Lord Jesus 
Christ is to relate the energies of the new 
life within to all the rest of his thought 
and feeling and activity. It is of the very 
nature of the experience which has come 
to him to take this form. A Christian 
experience is an imperial thing. It goes 
forth to conquer all the life. 

Immediately it touches and renews a 
man's relations to other men and women. 
It sweetens friendship. It takes away seeds 
of selfishness and calculation. It enables 
a man to be a better son, a deeper friend, 
a man of purer devotion in all human 
relations. It touches all the centers of his 
life and makes him capable of appreciating 
more and of giving more than he could 
ever give before. For the development of 
subtle and understanding sympathy, of 
steady and unflinching loyalty, there is 
no power like an applied Christian expe- 
100 



A CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 



rience. All a man's human relations have 
a new quality and a new richness when 
he becomes a Christian. The love of 
Christ purifies all the channels of love in 
a man's life. As the years pass he may 
become a sort of expert in devotion. 

Then a man's Christian experience 
touches and transforms his work. The 
mystic Tauler is said to be responsible 
for the saying, "An anvil may be conse- 
crated and a pulpit may be desecrated." 
All the work of a fully alive Christian is 
consecrated. He is serving Christ at his 
desk, in the shop, in the field, on the plat- 
form — wherever his work may take him. 
With this sense of the sanctity of all human 
tasks he works with a new faithfulness. 
He is daily inspired to do his very best. 
He works with a new enthusiasm. His 
task has not only received dignity. It has 
been glorified. A Christian man's labor 
may actually become in a real sense an 
act of worship. He works with an earnest 
discrimination. Such lofty labor must not 
be soiled by unworthy methods or unfair 
dealings or unclean hands. The applica- 
101 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



tion of his Christian experience purifies 
his work. 

A man's Christian experience touches and 
transforms his play. His heart has been 
so influenced by the love of Christ that 
he is full of responsiveness to simple enjoy- 
ments. He does not need hot and highly 
seasoned recreation to give pleasure to a 
dulled palate. His conscience is at peace, 
and he does not need to seek wild and 
maddening pleasures to drown the voice 
of an inner unrest. His mirth is as spon- 
taneous and glad as a child's. He has the 
greatest capacity for gayety without bitter- 
ness or evil of any man in all the world. 

A man's Christian experience touches and 
transforms his relation to nature. It does 
not make a poet out of a man who has 
no temperamental responsiveness to natural 
beauty. But it does give a certain noble 
richness, a certain added fine flavor to 
whatever sense of the wonder of the world 
of ancient slumbering hills and gay whisper- 
ing streams a man has in his heart. This 
world of awakening spring, of opulent 
summer, of autumns when nature appears 
102 



A CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 

in dazzling robes, to be remembered through 
long winter days; the world of calm white 
snows with flowers slumbering far beneath 
— all this world is seen with new eyes of 
glad appreciation as a man realizes that 
it is God's world. All these beauties are 
so many thoughts of God. The same 
God who whispers peace in human hearts 
speaks beauty through all nature. So it 
comes to pass that there is something 
sacramental in the Christian thought of 
nature. Even its bluff, robust, vigorous 
phases tell something of the manifold 
aspects of the life of God. 

A Christian experience touches a man's 
relation to art. It gives him a sort of 
impalpable intuition as regards its beauties. 
There is a quickness in turning from the 
hectic and the decadent. There is a sensi- 
tiveness to that aesthetic anarchy which, 
getting into a man's blood, may wreck his 
life. Beauty must not only be a matter 
of noble lines and color, full of all sweet 
subtlety of suggestion. It must be free 
from the heat which burns. It must have 
wholesomeness at its least, and it must 
103 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



have noble inspiration at its best. A 
Christian experience clarifies a man's sense 
that what is bad morals can never be good 
art. This making ethical and spiritual of 
the aesthetic sense does not mean that 
a self-conscious, artificial, didactic quality 
comes into a man's judgment of art. It 
just means that with simple spontaneity he 
feels that a thing must be noble in order 
to be beautiful. 

A Christian experience sets certain stand- 
ards for all of a man's thought and mental 
life, and gives it a warming inspiration. 
The mind is to be used with zestful, hearty 
eagerness because it is God's gift for great 
purposes. The new life working in a 
man's heart finds its way into his mind 
with a scorn of intellectual sophistry and 
make-believe, with a passionate eagerness 
for candor and truth. It does not give a 
man a new mind, but it cleanses and up- 
lifts all of his mental activity. And in 
some deep way it bears a wise witness 
to the fact that after clear and cogent 
thinking there may be more to be said. 
Life is larger than logic, and reality is a 
104 



A CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 



completer thing than mental processes. So 
the Christian by virtue of his experiences 
ought to find it easier to use his mind as 
a trusted servant, and not to be mastered 
by any of its mechanical, mutinous moods. 

A man's Christian experience relates it- 
self to his physical life. His body has the 
dignity of a shrine. The man feels himself 
the guardian of a temple which must be 
kept clean and pure. So the test of all 
physical experiences becomes twofold. Do 
they lessen a man's sense of mental and 
moral values? If so, they must be dis- 
carded. Do they contribute to a life which 
is growing in all higher things ? Then 
they have a real place. The physical is 
not to become an end in itself. It is to 
be the means for the realization of the 
moral and spiritual ends of life. So the 
bodily life is to be kept as vigorous and 
beautiful as possible, always being used as 
the instrument of nobler things beyond itself. 

A man's Christian experience touches and 
transforms all of his activity. 

Our Lord is still the God of might, 
In deeds, in deeds he takes delight. 

105 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



The Christian's love to Christ, his love to 
his fellow men, is to be all the while ex- 
pressing itself in his actions. They are the 
concrete expressions of his Christian expe- 
rience. There are some things he cannot 
do. As long as he lives he is discovering 
new implications of his Christian experience 
in this realm of his deeds. His activity 
saves his emotions from degenerating into 
sentimentality. His emotions keep his activ- 
ity tuned to the quality of a noble inspira- 
tion. His dailv life is a constant endeavor 
1/ 

to coin his inner life into deeds. 

So it comes to pass that there is literally 
nothing foreign to a man's Christian expe- 
rience. It is to give new stability to his 
work and new zest to his play. It is to 
give added clarity to his thought and a 
new depth to his appreciation of all noble 
and beautiful things. It is to be the king 
of his activity, sending forth true, loving 
deeds to do its bidding all through his life. 

In this fashion the spiritual life is kept 
human and human experience comes to 
feel the mastery of the spiritual. A man 
is saved from that delicate and over-refined 
106 



A CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 



spirituality which has lost the salt of con- 
tact with all the real things of the life of 
the passing days. And the deeds of the 
bustling, busy man are freed from that 
hard and selfish secularity which is so 
likely to characterize them if the warming 
currents of a deep spirituality are not 
poured in upon them day by day. 

Thus is created that fine product — so 
much finer than a dim-eyed, other-worldly 
mystic or a shrewd, hard-headed man of 
this life's affairs — a Christian of the world. 
This man is full of eager interest in all 
human things. He is in hearty and vigor- 
ous contact with the life about him. He 
is a comradely man of men. But he is 
also a man of the hidden communion. He 
is a man of God. He knows the meaning 
of those great creative energies which flow 
forth from Calvary. His inner peace, which 
sets the cross in a never-fading glow of 
light, is deeper than all the zest and interest 
of the passing days. It is what he has 
learned at Calvary which gives new ad- 
equacy to all his thought and new per- 
spective to all his view of life. All his human 
107 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



interests, all his experiences are richer and 
fuller and truer because in his own heart 
there is a perpetual memory of the death 
of Christ. Nature, thought, friendship, art, 
and activity receive their meaning from 
what he learned at Calvary. 



108 



CHAPTER IX 
THE REGENERATION OF SOCIETY 



CHAPTER IX 

The Regeneration of Society 

The Christian man has a new and creative 
experience. It moves on toward the great 
goal of sainthood. It becomes a life mov- 
ing through all the aspects of his individual 
experience and relating itself to everything 
that pertains to the man's body and his 
mind, to his conscience and his heart, to 
his will and his activity. All this we have 
seen in our previous thought about the 
implications of a Christian experience. 

We must now take a further step. The 
Christian life has a goal beyond the saint- 
hood of the individual man. It has a goal 
beyond the complete mastery of his inner 
and outer life. That goal is the regenera- 
tion of society. 

When we inquire as to the nature of 
the Christian program for the transforma- 
tion of social life, the reply at first seems 
surprisingly simple. It consists in the 
statement of a few of the principles of the 
Bible. But their concrete application to 
111 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



the varied aspects of the social life of men 
becomes a complex matter indeed. 

The great words back of all adequate 
thought of social reform are righteousness 
and love. One of these words is the con- 
tribution of the Old Testament, the other 
the gift of the New. It was the prophet 
Amos who first pronounced the word "right- 
eousness" so that lightning flashed through 
it. Speaking at the sanctuary at Bethel 
to a people who were religious but corrupt, 
he cried out, "Seek righteousness and ye 
shall live." He reenforced his message 
with an indictment of his people's sins 
poured forth at white heat, with a threat 
of future calamity which made the sky 
seem to darken. He remorselessly uncov- 
ered the evil of his people's life and let 
the light of God shine in on their vices. 
He was a living moral passion. His words 
were unforgettable, and after him prophecy 
was full of moral fire. 

The word "love" in its full social mean- 
ing is the gift of Jesus. What he did, more 
than what he said, taught the world the 
meaning of love for the weak and the 
112 



REGENERATION OF SOCIETY 

failing. To be sure, he put it into speech: 
"God so loved . . . that he gave," and 
God's love was for a blighted world. The 
good Samaritan felt a surging compassion 
for a robbed and wounded traveler which 
had the very heart of the social passion 
in it. The owner of the vineyard who 
gave to those who worked but a short 
time wages they had no cause to expect, 
and insisted on his right to be generous, was 
an example of that uncalculating devotion 
which is to change the world. But, after 
all, it is the example of Jesus which creates 
the social passion. For our sakes he be- 
came poor, that we through his poverty 
might become rich. Here we have the 
very essence of social consecration. We 
cannot be contented with comfort enjoyed 
thoughtlessly, with the mind and the senses 
and the tastes being ministered to while 
others are suffering painful lack. As long 
as society has plague spots and spots of 
dire privation we must labor for its regenera- 
tion. As long as wrongs are allowed to 
lift their heads we must work for the 
righting of wrongs. The social program 
113 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



calls for the reign of righteousness and the 
reign of brotherhood. 

In the name of righteousness the com- 
mercial world is invaded. The principles 
of justice must be made to rule in all the 
buying and selling of men. Whether it be 
in stocks and bonds, or the wool which 
comes from the sheep country, or the fruit 
and vegetables of the market gardener; 
whether it be the wood from the forest 
or the mineral from the mine, the bartering 
of men must be mastered by integrity and 
honesty and fair play. 

In the name of righteousness the indus- 
trial world is invaded. The factory must 
be made sanitary, not as a concession to 
sentiment but as a matter of justice. Chil- 
dren must be kept out of employment 
which will dwarf and impoverish their 
whole lives, not merely because we feel ten- 
derly toward children, but because children 
have rights and society has rights. 

We have no right to deprive the child 
of a life of normal health and productive- 
ness, and we have no right to deprive 
society of the output of a full and un wasted 
114 



REGENERATION OF SOCIETY 

life. The homes and the conditions of 
labor must be kept such as to make the 
worker as strong and efficient as possible. 
This is his just claim, and it is the just 
claim of society. The places where men 
live must be made and kept clean and 
suitable for the development of the fullest 
and most efficient life. Legislation must 
prevent any individual from doing harm to 
society by the place in which he lives or 
the place in which he allows another man 
to live. 

In the name of righteousness the political 
world is invaded. The city whose govern- 
ment is a mass of corruption is a menace 
to every moral standard among its popula- 
tion. The country where votes can be 
bought and sold is sapping the moral 
vitality of its citizens. A man has a just 
claim to live in an atmosphere clean and 
charged with moral tonic. Municipal and 
national corruption spreads germs of ethical 
contagion everywhere. The whole political 
fabric must be mastered and controlled by 
right-minded men, working according to 
right principles. 

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THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Such methods of expressing and making 
effective the people's will as work most 
quickly and effectively and leave least room 
for the trickery of the conscienceless poli- 
tician must be put in operation. Such 
sanctions as prevent sudden mob impulses 
from gaining quick control must be kept 
in place. The method and the activity 
of the body politic must be filled with a 
concern for righteousness. 

The social life of men is invaded in the 
name of righteousness. There is to be a 
sharp and wise inspection of all social 
practices and manners, and those which 
weaken moral fiber, which tend to make 
the life effeminate and finally bad, must 
be put down. The amusements of men 
must be those which relax and not those 
which disintegrate. The pleasure which 
leaves behind seeds of evil is to be fought 
persistently and given no quarter. 

Certain great evils are to be met in a 
combat of relentless antagonism. The in- 
tense nervous strain of modern life makes 
it more important than ever before that 
men should not come to depend on arti- 
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REGENERATION OF SOCIETY 

ficial stimulants. In sluggish days, when 
life moved with dull heaviness, it may 
have been less important to keep constantly 
in mind the dangers of intemperance. But 
in our day of constantly nerve-racking de- 
mand no man can afford to trifle with 
artificial stimulants for a moment. Life 
itself is overstimulating to multitudes of 
modern men. It will not improve the 
situation to make nerves overtaxed already 
the victims of narcotics. The battle against 
the habit of drinking intoxicants is more 
important now than it has been in any 
other time. 

There are some forms of the expression 
of modern life and activity which must be 
watched with constant and penetrating scru- 
tiny. The organization of great resources 
of wealth and the organization of great 
numbers of workers are inevitable results of 
the present conditions. Either of these 
organic masses of power may be a great 
servant of righteousness or a great servant 
of evil. When organized wealth becomes 
drunk with power it is the foe of society. 
When organized labor forgets the behests of 
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THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

right, in its own lust of strength, it is also 
an enemy to the true welfare of men. The 
gigantic combinations of men must be mas- 
tered in the name of righteousness. 

Then there is the social program of 
brotherhood. Of course it embraces all that 
righteousness demands. But it goes farther. 
It gladly gives itself in unselfish deeds 
for the bringing in of the day of brother- 
hood. It organizes institutional churches, 
where every need of human life is minis- 
tered to, in our great cities. It leads men 
to give their best years to the securing of 
playgrounds for children and wholesome 
environment for all. It goes to live among 
those who lack, to give them the blessings 
of those who possess. It seeks out the 
wide-lying countryside, often so empty of 
inspiration and fullness of life, and minis- 
ters to its need. It follows the pioneer 
to the wilderness, and the builder of a 
new life to the irrigated tract where he is 
making a home, always to minister and to 
bring fullness of life. It recognizes that 
the gift of personality is a greater gift 
than any other, and it pours out life itself 
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REGENERATION OF SOCIETY 



in years of glad service for the uplifting 
of men. 

This social program in the name of 
righteousness and in the name of brother- 
hood seems overwhelming. Who is suffi- 
cient for these things ? Who will go into 
the dangers and the hardships of the 
battle for righteousness in the commercial 
world through long and weary years ? Who 
will fight against industrial evil, giving and 
taking hard blows in the testing conflict ? 
Who will be steady under the ceaseless 
fire of hostility as he fights for political 
reform ? Who will be brave enough to 
go forth to the battle for a social life which 
shall cast out all that soils and harms 
the world? Who will take up the old 
banner of temperance reform with a loyalty 
nothing shall daunt? Who will be the 
bulwarks of society against all the dangers 
which come from vast organizations of 
wealth and of men ? Who will give life in 
the drudgery of endless devotion to small 
social tasks ? Who will man the settle- 
ments, and work in the lonely countryside, 
and in the new West? How shall men be 
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THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



given energy and devotion and undying 
faithfulness for these great tasks ? 

There is one answer. It is the men 
and women whose lives have been per- 
sonally renewed by the grace of Christ of 
whom we have a right to expect that they 
believe without hesitation in the moral re- 
newal of society. It is the men and women 
in whom the creative energies of the new 
life are at work, from whom we have a 
right to expect heroic faithfulness to all 
social tasks. 

There is no deep gulf fixed between the 
evangelical and the social interpretations of 
religion. They belong together. A regen- 
erated life is to work for a regenerated 
world. The men of social passion have a 
program. Evangelical religion furnishes a 
dynamic. When the two are united the 
transformation of society in the name of 
righteousness and brotherhood is not an 
impossible task. 



120 



CHAPTER X 
THE FAR-FLUNG BATTLE LINE 



CHAPTER X 

The Far-Flung Battle Line 

The Christian man must face at last the 
need of the whole round world. His 
experience begins as a new power in his 
own life. It has its first battles to fight 
and its first victories to win in the arena 
of his own mind and heart. It moves for- 
ward to the complete possession of his 
motives and his thoughts and his activities. 
Then by an inner impulsion the new force 
which has come into command of his own 
life goes out to conquer society. Wher- 
ever there are evil to overthrow and good to 
enthrone in the life about him there is work 
waiting for his hand. All this is vastly im- 
portant and wonderfully occupying. But 
the day comes when a man must lift up 
his eyes and behold the whole harvest 
field. Then he discovers that the field is 
the world. 

Three important aspects of the world- 
wide enterprise which then confront him 
may be considered: first, its motives; 
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THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



second, its methods; and third, its results. 
The motives of the world-wide enterprise 
are many. The very nature of a Christian 
experience is such that it wants to get out 
and express itself and fill the world. Life 
so bubbles up in the Christian, energy and 
richness of inspiration so possess him, that 
these things drive him out to give to others. 
He wants to share his secret with other 
men, then with more men, and so out over 
the world until there is not a man left 
who has not felt the wonder and the crea- 
tive power which he has known in his own 
heart. Christian experience being what it 
is, the missionary enterprise is inevitable. 
The new life when conscious of its implica- 
tions must go forth on the high adventure 
of conquering the world. 

Then there is the motive which comes 
from a sense of the need of those dark, 
far-lying lands whose type of life has been 
formed apart from Christ. In some of them 
there have been wonderful gleams of beauty 
and moral aspiration, and the long tale 
of moral struggle has spelled itself out in 
great heroism. But what a sickening and 
124 



THE FAR-FLUNG BATTLE LINE 



heartrending story of moral and spiritual 
need is the tale of the life of the nations 
which have not known Christ! Physical 
desire relentlessly let loose and issuing in 
manifold and beastly vices; the mind cower- 
ing under the lash of a thousand super- 
stitions which make life a nightmare; the 
conscience heavy with its burden and beat- 
ing dully under its weight of sin; the heart 
sinned against by cruelty and hardness until 
gentle and tender emotions are like ex- 
quisite flowers blooming in an oasis in a 
desert, with the burning breath from the 
wide-lying sands blowing upon them; the 
will without moral leadership to master it 
for high decision; the whole life bound and 
fettered and lying in ruins — all this in a 
world where Christ has lived and loved 
and suffered and died and risen again. 
The more we know of the world without 
him the more eager we are to carry his 
message forth. 

Then there is the vision of what these 
people may become through the grace of 
Christ. A Christian experience makes a 
man a dreamer of dreams which are to 
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THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



be realized through the power of God, and 
his fairest dream has to do with the trans- 
forming touch of Christ upon the life of 
all the nations of the world. 

All this is gathered up and focused in 
the fact that the world-wide enterprise is 
Christ's own program for his followers. 
He has commanded us to go forth to all the 
world. The deepest thing in the life of a 
Christian is his personal allegiance to Jesus 
Christ. The Saviour is the Captain; he is 
the soldier. The Saviour is the Master; 
he is the slave. So the word of Jesus, 
"Go," is the blast of a trumpet sending 
him forth to battle. The whole meaning 
of his Christian life and its answer to the 
need of the world is gathered up in his 
response to the Master's command. The 
winning of the world is the great Chris- 
tian task. 

The methods of the world-wide enter- 
prise are varied. At the heart of them all 
is the power of the personal touch. The 
hand pressed on the brow of pain and 
bringing the gift of healing has opened a 
way for the gospel in many a community. 
126 



THE FAR-FLUNG BATTLE LINE 

Medical missions form a great letter of 
introduction which in country after country 
the missionary has presented with success. 
The teacher who opens the doors to all 
modern learning to the youth of the Orient 
is a powerful man in molding the future of 
his scholars. The drowsy East, rubbing 
its eyes and beginning to be eager to learn 
the secret of the West, heeds the school- 
master who comes as the advance agent of 
modern scientific knowledge. When he is 
a schoolmaster in the things of Christ as 
well, a great light indeed shines in on the 
minds and in the hearts of his scholars. The 
evangelist with the winged word of per- 
sonal testimony is a world-wide power. The 
man whose message focuses the history of 
his own soul speaks with a kind of author- 
ity which compels men to listen. The 
story of the cross, coming from a life full 
of its power, is simple and ineffably sweet 
and possesses a power to draw and master 
men. The personal touch of physician and 
educator and evangelist must be supple- 
mented in great and laborious ways. The 
patient industry of the translator brings 
127 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

the Bible into the speech of men. Thus 
the word of God is spoken to them in the 
tongue full of all the clinging memories of 
childhood. The garnered wisdom of Chris- 
tendom must be poured out in books in 
all the languages of men, the harvest of 
the past must be brought to their doors. 
While translators and authors busily ply 
their pens at all these tasks, the buzzing 
presses in many a mission throw off their 
great masses of printed words to be scat- 
tered over all lands until the last man is 
reached. The varied social ministries which 
answer to all the true and real things in 
human nature must be carried on, so that 
the labor of Christendom shall be varied 
enough to answer to every legitimate human 
outreach for knowledge, for work, for 
pleasure, for hope, and for love. 

All these varied ministries must be per- 
formed with some real understanding of 
the men and women who are to be reached 
by them. Patient and loving study results 
in a knowledge of their thoughts and their 
ways, and the good things about their lives, 
and what are the doors which will open 
128 



THE FAR-FLUNG BATTLE LINE 



to friendship and confidence and love. The 
approach must be made with infinite del- 
icacy and tact and sympathy. So through 
men's own thoughts and customs and 
friendships shall we be able to lead them 
to that which overwhelmingly transcends 
anything that they know. 

The results we are seeking from the 
world-wide enterprise are many and diversi- 
fied. 

The first is to give all men and women 
everywhere an opportunity to know Jesus 
Christ as a personal Saviour. This is 
an even vaster task than it seems at first. 
It is not merely to preach in the presence 
of all human beings. It is to preach in 
such a way that the need of the gospel is 
felt by the hearer. It is to preach in such 
a way that the adequacy of Christ stands 
forth clearly and cogently. It is to preach 
in such a fashion that the vital claims of 
the message come home to the heart and 
conscience of the hearers. Only when men 
really feel the vitality of the gospel message 
can they be said actually to have heard it. 
Only then have they had an adequate 
129 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



opportunity to know our Lord as a per- 
sonal Saviour. 

The second result of the world-wide 
enterprise is the gathering of those who 
become Christians into some organic fellow- 
ship where they may be trained and guided 
to the appropriation of all that the Chris- 
tian life has for them, and to the most 
efficient service. The joy of the missionary 
when he sees the light of the love of Christ 
and the gladness of salvation shining in 
the eyes of those to whom he has preached 
is one of the great joys of earth. As a 
convert stands forth, with living words 
confessing Christ and the salvation he has 
found, the missionary is ready to exclaim, 
"On this rock will I build the Church, 
and the gates of hell shall not prevail 
against it." But these men who have found 
the Saviour — this fraternity of salvation in 
a heathen land — will need patient guidance 
and wise instruction for many a day and 
many a year. There will be formed the 
native Church, the second result of world- 
wide enterprise. 

The third result is the effort of the 
130 



THE FAR-FLUNG BATTLE LINE 



native Church. It in turn is to become 
an agent of evangelism — the most effective 
agent of all. It in turn is to become a 
schoolmaster of its own nation in many 
things, and most of all in the things of 
Christ. It in turn is to produce medical 
ministers to the need of men. The whole 
labor of the missionary is to become the 
labor of the native Church. 

Through all this and beyond it there is 
to come a fourth result — the leavening of 
Christless lands with that common stock 
of Christian knowledge and sentiment and 
activity which is one of the greatest posses- 
sions of Christendom. The whole atmos- 
phere of heathen lands is to be transformed. 
The common ideal of the nations is to 
become Christian. 

A fifth result is to be the operation of 
all those forces for the regeneration of 
society on the mission fields which are now 
at work in Christendom. Commerce and 
political life, as it develops, and all the 
busy activities of men are to be studied 
and grappled with and mastered in the 
name of Christ. 

131 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



So the great goal of world-wide Christian 
effort comes in view. That is the making 
completely Christian of the life of the 
world. Thought and feeling, will and 
activity — all of these are to be taken cap- 
tive in the name of Christ. 

Christianity begins with a saved man. 
It ends with a saved world. It occupies 
the range of the individual life of the man. 
It goes forth to occupy the whole life of 
society. There is nothing foreign to it. 
There is no human life it would not master 
and no human activity it would not con- 
trol. This, then, is the meaning of the 
world-wide program. This is the goal of 
the world-wide adventure. It is a noble 
dream far beyond our power of realizing. 
But the mastery of the planet is not too 
much for the power of Christ. 



132 



CHAPTER XI 



THE CEASELESS MINISTRY OF 
THE HOLY GHOST 



CHAPTER XI 

The Ceaseless Ministry of the 
Holy Ghost 

Men have a great ally in their battles for 
righteousness. That ally is the Holy Spirit. 
When they hear his name it sounds strange 
and mysterious and far off. They suppose 
that it has to do with raptures foreign 
to their experiences and ecstasies beyond 
their attaining. It is true that the Holy 
Spirit has to do with the sunlit summits 
of Christian experience. It is also true 
that he has to do with the practical life 
of men. There is no human being who 
has not heard the voice of the Holy Ghost. 

Before approaching this diversified and 
potent ministry we may well remind our- 
selves of one or two fundamental convic- 
tions about the Holy Spirit which come as 
a deposit out of the great Christian past. 
The first is that he is God, working with 
all the authority and power and finality 
and adequacy of the divine. Of the Holy 
Spirit, as of Jesus, we may affirm that he 
135 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



is "very God of very God." The second 
is that he is a separate Person from the 
Father and the Son, having his own center 
of consciousness and feeling and will, al- 
though all these persons are bound together 
in the great unity of the divine life. Of 
this more will be said in the chapter on 
the Trinity. At present we content ourselves 
with the affirmation — crystallized from the 
New Testament and Christian conscious- 
ness — that the Holy Spirit is a great Person 
in the divine life, in a real sense separate 
from the Father and the Son, while at the 
same time he shares with them in that 
fundamental oneness of life which makes 
the Godhead a unity. 

These two convictions may be said to 
be the skeleton of the doctrine of the 
Holy Spirit. If we keep them in the 
background of our minds, our thought will 
have a certain Christian robustness and 
adequacy which is not possible without 
them. 

Now, the great fact about this third 
Person in the blessed Trinity is that he 
has immediate access to the inner life of 
136 



MINISTRY OF THE HOLY GHOST 

every man and woman in the whole world. 
He works through the processes of a man's 
own life, where he is, in the great battle 
against evil and for good. He always 
assumes the point of view of the man in 
whom he is working. He is a constant 
urgency making that man feel that he 
ought to do the thing which he knows is right. 
He gives an added impetus to every good 
motive and opposes the evil motives in 
the lives of men. He is the conscience of 
the race, crying out in every human heart 
that there is a right which ought to be 
obeyed. In the terms of a man's own 
life and thought he speaks to him. He 
does not call from without. He urges from 
within. His voice seems the cry of a man's 
own best self. Adjusting himself to every 
strange and subtle meaning and experience 
of a man's life with perfect sympathy, the 
Holy Spirit presses the man in the very 
path of his own life away from evil and 
toward good. This is a world-wide min- 
istry. It goes on under the sanctions of 
every religion and every lack of religion. 
It works through every language and cus- 
137 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



torn and type of human life. Wherever 
there are men and women who can think 
and feel and do, who can love a ad suffer 
and act, the Holy Spirit is present as the 
intimate companion of the soul. In every 
battle a man fights against evil he has the 
reenforcement of the presence of the Holy 
Ghost, and at the very center of his life 
the Spirit urges him toward the battles 
which will dethrone what he knows is bad 
in Ins life and enthrone what is good. 
This is the patient, self-effacing, race-wide 
activity of the Spirit of God. 

But this by no means exhausts the work 
of the Holy Ghost. In fact, this is only 
an introduction to a deeper work. Sooner 
or later God's Spirit brings each man and 
woman to the critical battle. He is not 
content with being an ally always ready 
to reenforce in the moral battles. The time 
comes when he brings on the battle. He 
leads a man to the place where he must 
face his personal responsibility and decide. 
There is no coercion which interferes with 
a man's freedom. The only coercion is 
in the fact that a man is forced to use 
138 



MINISTRY OF THE HOLY GHOST 



his freedom. He is not overmastered in 
such a fashion that he must decide in 
any particular way. But he is forced to 
decide somehow. He is held in the grasp 
of the moral omnipotence of the Holy 
Spirit, and in the hour of crisis he must 
make up his mind and settle his personal 
bearing. He must say "Yes" to the best 
and "No" to the worst, or "Yes" to the 
worst and "No" to the best. 

In this supreme hour of crisis God's 
Spirit does not ask a man what he be- 
lieves. That is not a question which is 
fundamental enough. He does not ask 
him if he is orthodox according to the 
standard of any faith. It is perfectly possi- 
ble to be orthodox and bad. Instead of 
being asked what he believes, he is asked 
what he means. Deeper than all his 
thoughts, deeper than all his creed, what 
does he mean about life ? That is the 
great question. It is the fair and final 
question. And the answer to it, when all 
the intention of a man's personal life is 
gathered into the answer, settles a man's 
destiny. 

139 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



So God's Spirit brings a man to the 
place where he must decide for or against 
the best he knows. Here, again, the 
Spirit assumes the point of view, even the 
prejudices of the man. He is perfectly 
fair to this human being whom he holds 
in his great grasp. Whatever his religion, 
among the great ethnic religions, whatever 
his training and environment, the Holy 
Spirit presses this question: "Will you be 
loyal to the best you know ? Will you 
put it in command of your life ? Will 
you follow it unflinchingly ? What will you 
do with it? Now you must decide!" 

It is at the point of this struggle that 
the probation of a heathen who has never 
heard of Christ, or of any man who has 
never felt the complete compulsion of the 
claims of Christ, is decided. 

With all that he lacks — and how poor 
he is without the knowledge of Christ! — 
he can still mean good and not evil, he can 
still decide to follow the best he knows. 
When he does that it is the moral equiv- 
alent, on the human side, of conversion. 

No human being who lives to maturity 
140 



MINISTRY OF THE HOLY GHOST 



can escape this hour of strategy. In it 
personality becomes most kingly. Every 
power of the life is focused on the great 
issue. The man decides. 

It is possible to decide against good and 
for evil with deep personal intention. It 
is possible to decide to refuse to follow 
the best one knows and deliberately to 
follow the worst one knows. It is possible 
to mean evil. It is possible, not because 
of ignorance or moral confusion, but just 
because one wants to do it, to choose the 
evil, and like it and make it one's own. 
When with deep personal intention, in the 
hour of final personal crisis, a man gathers 
up all the energies of his life and inten- 
tionally and decisively decides for the evil 
and against the good, he has committed 
the sin against the Holy Ghost. All the 
pressure of divine love short of coercion 
has been thrust upon him. The resources 
of God have been gathered in a final 
attempt to lead the man to right decision. 
In the man's heart, deeper than opinions 
or creeds, God has put the great question, 
and the man, with no subterfuge or evasion, 
141 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



has said: "I mean evil. I like it, and I 
want it." That decision cuts the root of 
reality in a man's life. It severs him from 
God. 

Of course it is possible for a man to 
think that he has committed this sin of 
sins when he has not. A bold and daring 
delight in evil may blacken many days, 
and yet it may be true that the battle at 
the citadel of a man's life has not yet been 
fought. Much of the territory of his life 
has been devastated by evil deeds, but 
there is yet a Gibraltar of deep personality 
where the battle has not been waged. 
But some day the fight at the citadel is 
fought, and in that day if evil conquers, 
all is lost. The man has slain goodness 
in his own heart. 

On the other hand, anywhere in the 
world a man may decide to mean good- 
ness. He may decide to follow the best 
he knows. Dark superstitions may be- 
wilder him. Strange faiths may have 
mental lordship over him. Still he may 
decide to follow the gleam of brightest 
light which he sees. A man may make that 
142 



MINISTRY OF THE HOLY GHOST 



decision with all his might, so that it ex- 
presses the very deepest meaning of his life. 

Now, under the guidance of the Holy 
Spirit a wonderful process sets in. It may 
be described as the way of pilgrimage for 
the growing moral man. The great decision 
has been made. The man goes out to 
live in the light of it. And this thing 
happens: At once his sense of what he 
ought to be and what he ought to do be- 
gins to grow. It may have been very 
small at first, but it grows and grows until 
it fills the sky. A man's moral ideal be- 
comes so vast that it overwhelms him. 
(Compare Professor Curtis, in "The Chris- 
tian Faith.") 

At last a man makes a strange and sad 
and bewildering discovery. He can never 
satisfy the demands of his own growing 
moral life. His own nature asks more of 
him than he can do. His own moral sense 
has become a tyrant asking him to per- 
form the impossible. At the very moment 
when his life is aflame with ethical intensity 
he faces despair. 

The meaning of all this is not far to 
143 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



seek. The man is standing on the border 
land between morality and religion. The 
Holy Spirit, working from within, has led 
him to this spot. Morality consists in trying 
to perform the great ethical task by one's 
self. Religion is trusting in some deity for 
help. And the hour when a man sees that 
he cannot do the thing alone is the great 
hour when he looks up and cries out for 
God. 

In many a land the reigning religion 
does not offer a man what he most needs 
in this great hour of strategy. Then a 
wonderful thing may happen. In some 
dim, beautiful way the sense is borne in 
upon the struggling man that, somehow, 
somewhere, what he means and is trying 
to do will be taken account of. "All that 
the world's coarse thumb and finger failed 
to plumb" will be recognized and valued. 
He can trust that his struggle is observed 
and that he will not at last be left alone. 
It is a soft whisper of peace. It is the 
approach to a Christian experience which a 
moral struggler who does not know of 
Christ may make. In a way it is the 
144 



MINISTRY OF THE HOLY GHOST 



spiritual equivalent of the divine side of 
conversion. 

Now, we come to the great Christian 
work of the Holy Spirit. Although it is 
true that he adjusts himself to the actual 
state of the inner life of every man and 
woman in the world, is their ally in every 
moral fight, brings on the battle when they 
decide what they mean about life, leads 
men to moral vision where they see that 
they can never perform the task alone, 
and whispers a sense of divine encourage- 
ment in their most despairing hour, it 
remains true that his full and complete 
and most fruitful work can be done only in 
connection with the facts and truths of the 
Christian religion. The moral battle can 
be fought with mental and ethical clarity 
when the moral intensity of the Hebrew 
prophets and the leaders of the Chris- 
tian faith throbs in a man's blood. 
When with a vision of the blazing right- 
eousness of God a man faces life, the Holy 
Spirit can do great things in his heart. 
His own sense of failure is sharpened into 
all the moral adequacy of a conviction of 
145 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



sin. The very roots of his moral life may 
be reached by the shaking sense of moral 
failure which now comes to him. 

At the borderland between morality and 
religion it is only by meeting Christ that 
a man can find the deepest peace. It is 
the God-man, winsomely human, yet God 
in the flesh, whom a man can trust with 
the completest moral commitment. And 
when the consciousness of sin cuts like 
sword thrusts, it is only the Christ of the 
cross who can speak complete peace. The 
Holy Spirit intensifies a man's sense of sin, 
then he fills his heart with the wonder of 
the deed on Calvary as a deed for him; 
and as the man trusts the Christ who died 
for him his heart is filled with beatific 
peace. There is all the difference in the 
world between the vague hope which the 
Holy Spirit can whisper into a heathen 
heart and the triumphant rapture of the 
dawn of the Christian life. 

From the beginning of a true Christian 
life on through all the days the Holy 
Spirit is a guide from within. He uplifts 
Christ, his will, his lordship; he leads the 
146 



MINISTRY OF THE HOLY GHOST 



life toward that triumph of love which is 
the goal of sainthood; he inspires the 
Christian in his relating of his Christian 
experience to all the other experiences of 
his life; he energizes him for all social 
service and the working for the regeneration 
of society. He sends him forth as a sharer 
in the great task of the winning of the 
world. He is the companion of the mis- 
sionary and the ally of the Christian 
worker. He makes worship potent and pre- 
pares human hearts for the eager words of 
those who would win them. Ceaselessly, 
constantly, and pervasively he works as the 
power in the human heart to bring about 
the triumph of the Christian faith. He 
seeks to enthrone Christ in men, in insti- 
tutions, and through the whole range of 
life. The dynamic of religion is the mighty 
ministry of the Holy Spirit. 



147 



CHAPTER XII 



THE CHURCH AND THE 
CHRISTIAN TASK 



CHAPTER XII 

The Church and the Christian Task 

We may think of the Church in a number 
of different ways. Approaching it from the 
standpoint of the new life, we may think 
of it as the company of men and women 
whose lives have been vitalized by its cur- 
rents. Approaching it from the standpoint 
of the great redemption, we may think of 
it as the company of men and women who 
have accepted and made personal the mes- 
sage of the cross. Approaching it from 
the standpoint of the teachings of Jesus, 
we may think of it as the society of men 
and women who accept those teachings as 
authoritative and are seriously endeavoring 
to follow them in the practice of their 
lives. Approaching it from the standpoint 
of the deity of Jesus, we may say that the 
Church is that body of men who in gen- 
uine and vital fashion accept the Lordship 
of Jesus. Approaching it from the stand- 
point of ecclesiastical organization, we may 
say that the Church consists of those bodies 
151 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



of men and women who have associated 
themselves together as the historic expres- 
sion of the Christian faith. In these 
approaches we will find two points of 
emphasis — an inner and an outer. On the 
inner side are belief, conviction, and expe- 
rience. On the outer are the affiliation 
with some organization and the practical 
activity of the life. All this goes to show 
how complex and rich a thing is the Chris- 
tian Church. You cannot get its meaning 
and mission into a single sharply turned 
epigram. 

From the standpoint of the preacher- 
theologian the most natural approach to 
the thought of the Church is through the 
necessities inherent in the Christian task. 
The Christian task is the making Christian 
of the life of the individual, of society, and 
of the world. It includes an inner expe- 
rience and a new type of life for the race. 
Now, this great task obviously cannot be 
accomplished by isolated individuals, how- 
ever devoted, and able, and illumined by 
the Spirit of God. Organization is nec- 
essary for any decisive impact upon the 
152 



THE CHRISTIAN TASK 



world. But it is also true that by its 
very nature Christianity is more than an 
individual thing. It knits men into brother- 
hood. It not only organizes the varied 
forces of a man's life into unity. It organ- 
izes various men into unity. It creates a 
social solidarity. 

Now, as an expression of the social 
solidarity which Christian experience cre- 
ates, and to make possible decisive im- 
pact upon the life of the world, the 
Church has its place. Historically, the 
Church was the creation of Christian expe- 
rience and the means of the farther spread 
of that same experience. The visible 
Church was brought into being by means 
of the Church invisible. 

The center of power in the Church 
in every age is right at this point. It is 
full of outrushing Christian energy just in 
proportion to the number of men and 
women it contains whose lives have been 
renewed by the vitalities of the cross. And 
this represents one great ideal of the 
Church. To bring every church member 
to a participation in the transforming and 
153 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



energizing power of a redemptive Christian 
experience is one of the great aims of the 
preacher. At the same time it has always 
been true, and it is particularly true now, 
that the circle marking evangelical expe- 
rience and the circle including earnest 
church members are not synonymous. 
There are multitudes of loyal followers of 
Jesus to whom the gate of a typical Chris- 
tian experience has not yet opened. They 
belong inside the Church. There is a great 
ministry to be performed in their behalf. 
They are often of a practical serviceable- 
ness and efficiency which cannot be spoken 
of too highly. But they do not represent 
the most significant pulse of the Church's 
life. 

Then there are those who have all sorts 
of intellectual difficulties, but who are will- 
ing unhesitatingly to accept the practical 
leadership of Jesus. They belong inside the 
Church. The Church has a great work to 
do for them. They are often men and 
women of the utmost usefulness. But they 
too are apart from the Church's center of 
inspiration. 

154 



THE CHRISTIAN TASK 

There is another group within the Church 
without any right to be there. The Church 
never intentionally opens its doors to in- 
sincere men. It invites the tempted. It 
invites the fallen who desire to rise. It in- 
vites the wicked who desire to become 
good. But it does not invite the unre- 
pentant. Yet the unrepentant enter. The 
deliberately evil who intend to remain evil 
become a part of the Church's organization. 
The tares grow among the wheat. This 
happens in spite of that legitimate function 
of discipline which inheres in the Church. 
Only an atmosphere tense with earnestness 
and rebuke for evil tends to reduce this 
phenomenon to a minimum. 

These are the elements which go to make 
up that organized body which is to be 
about the Christian task. Some important 
observations may be made about the state 
of the Church when one of these groups 
is in command. When insincere men be- 
come dominant in any church, it is like the 
laying of a hand of death upon it. Even 
when the extent of their duplicity is not 
known there is a chilling and numbing 
155 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



atmosphere about the life of the church 
which comes from them. All the fine and 
beautiful characteristics of church life, which 
come to bloom and fruitage in an atmos- 
phere of sincerity and earnestness, begin to 
languish and wither. The name of the 
church is left, but its power has departed. 

When the leadership of any church and 
its type of emphasis come from sincere men 
who have accepted the guidance of Jesus, 
but are perplexed by many mental diffi- 
culties, two phenomena emerge. First, there 
is an atmosphere of fine endeavor to serve 
in useful ways about all the church's work. 
Second, there is lacking in the church's 
worship and life that compelling note of 
authority without which a church can never 
be most efficient. There is much generous 
liberality of spirit. But that high com- 
manding authority which must speak itself 
at the heart of a great church is unheard. 

When the leaders of a church are men 
of great and zestful eagerness in all things, 
who have not entered the sanctuary of a 
typical evangelical experience, another sit- 
uation is found. There may be a vigorous 
156 



THE CHRISTIAN TASK 



and insistent orthodoxy. There may be no 
end of splendid Christian service. But a 
certain creative warmth which the vital 
experience of the evangel brings is lacking. 
The fireplace is there. There is plenty of 
just the right kind of fuel, but it has not 
occurred to anyone to light the fire. So 
there is a chill everywhere. In this atmos- 
phere the best work can never be done. 

When a church is led by those who know 
the secret of the cross, when its command- 
ing leadership devolves upon those who have 
the peace of the great evangel surging in 
their hearts, a condition is found which 
deserves our closest attention. This church 
has dynamic. It has creative power. It 
has outreaching life. Men whose sins have 
been forgiven through the grace of the 
Christ of the cross, and who cannot forget 
that most significant fact, whose rich and 
glowing experience is built on it, give tone 
and color to the life of the church. A 
great spiritual richness belongs to that 
church. It is a place where a man's soul 
may wake and grow. 

Such a church has room for earnest 
157 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Christians who have not yet entered into 
an experience which is typically evangelical ; 
it has room for men and women of intel- 
lectual difficulties who are willing to accept 
the practical leadership of Christ. But its 
life is dominated by men of the evangel. 

It is a church of this type which is 
ready with genuine efficiency to enter upon 
the Christian task. It is a place where 
individual decisions are made for Christ. 
It is a place where men find the peace 
of the cross. It is a place where the rich- 
ness of a Christian experience becomes their 
possession. It is a place where the central 
Christian experience is related to all other 
facts and experiences of the life. It is a 
place where men and women are guided 
to the goal of sainthood. 

This church is interested in all sorts of 
social and community service. It takes up 
all the useful activities of the institutional 
church. It becomes a center for the social 
and moral and intellectual life of the com- 
munity. It works for sanitation, for cheery 
childhood, and for all wise reforms. It 
impresses itself upon the community as a 
158 



THE CHRISTIAN TASK 



power that makes for righteousness. It is 
like a human body with a brain for all 
mental activity, hands and feet for all 
work and service and eyes to see all beauty. 
But the heart of it is the gospel of the 
cross. The throne room of this church's 
life is the possession of the Saviour. 

This church casts its eyes abroad upon 
the world. On continent after continent it 
sees the fields white with the harvest. It 
sees the vision of a world won for Christ. 
It girds itself to help in the earning out 
of that vision. The missionary impulse 
thrills through it. In prayer and study and 
giving it consecrates itself to the need of 
the world. 

This church touches life wherever there is 
need. It has the utmost richness and 
variety of life. It has the utmost skill 
and adaptability in service. And the inspir- 
ing source of it all is found in the creative 
energy which has come into the life of men 
as they have accepted Jesus as a personal 
Saviour. 



159 



CHAPTER Xin 
THE GREAT COMPANIONSHIP 



CHAPTER XIII 

The Great Companionship 

The door which opens into the life of 
prayer is not far from any man. Through 
many different kinds of experience men are 
led to open it. Sometimes a sorrow comes 
across the pathway of a fresh, eager life. 
It is a new experience, this clasping of the 
hand of pain, and in the midst of it a man 
reaches out beyond the suffering to the 
God of all, seeking comfort and help. So 
the door is opened and a man learns to pray. 

Sometimes a storm of disappointment 
breaks suddenly on the life. There have 
been fair, high dreams. Now they lie 
shattered, and a bewildered man looks on 
the wreck of his hopes. In this hour 
the instinct to seek the comfort of God 
makes itself heard in his heart. He cries 
out in the tragedy of his disappointment. 
And so he learns to use the language of 
prayer. 

Sometimes sickness brings a great pause 
in a busy, restless, constantly occupied life. 
163 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



The years have been so full that there has 
been no time for quiet, brooding thought. 
Now the heavy, unoccupied hours give 
much time for meditation. A man dis- 
covers a great empty place in his life. He 
thinks of how much he has missed of the 
touch of God upon it. Very softly he turns 
the knob and opens the door that leads 
into the way of prayer. He learns its 
meaning and its power and its joy, and 
he remains forever a man of supplication. 

Sometimes aspiration leads a man to pray. 
He has great desires for his life. He wants 
his manhood to be rich and strong and 
efficient. A lofty ideal hangs out on the 
horizon beckoning him. He feels very 
small and weak in the presence of the 
thought of all that he desires to be and 
all that he desires to do. He wants a 
great Helper. He opens the door of prayer 
and begins to learn the great secrets of 
its ministry. 

Sometimes it is the heart's own hunger 
for the sense of God's nearness which 
leads to prayer. Man is made for this 
high fellowship, and in his soul there calls 
164 



THE GREAT COMPANIONSHIP 



a desire which will be satisfied only with 
the sense that God is near. The outreach 
after God crystallizes into definite petitions. 
A man so learns the habit of prayer. 

Sometimes it is a sense of sin which 
leads a man to prayer. He is weighed down 
by a disastrous sense of moral failure. He 
has not been faithful to his great dream. 
He has not been true to the best he knows. 
He has trifled with life. He has loved 
evil things. He has done evil things. He 
has sent words winged with wrong thoughts 
out on a career of evil. He feels a blight 
upon his life. He needs forgiveness. He 
needs revitalizing. He needs power to suc- 
ceed where he has failed. Only God can 
help him. Driven by his dire need, he 
opens the door of prayer. He calls upon 
God for forgiveness. He begs for some 
force to make him strong. He prays for the 
power of moral victory in his life. So he 
learns the meaning of prayer. 

Through whatever experience a man 
comes to prayer, it is made into deeper 
and fuller meaning through the guidance 
of Christ. To begin with, Jesus as he 
165 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



speaks and lives in the Gospels makes all 
spiritual realities more mastering and vivid. 
Then Jesus gave prayer a place in his 
own life which is full of suggestion. To 
listen to the prayer of Jesus is like going 
to a school of devotion. And Jesus gives a 
man a great confidence in prayer. The 
more complete a man's sense of the unique 
glory of the Human-life-divine, the more 
adequate a man's sense of the meaning of 
Jesus for the world, the more does prayer 
become feasible, sensible, potent, a great 
constituent part of life. 

Calvary is a creator of prayer. You 
cannot easily pray to any sort of a God. 
But the heavenly Father who gave his 
Son as a great sacrifice of moral love 
draws prayer from us. We dare to come 
to him with our sins. We are willing to 
come to his infinite tenderness in our 
grief. We are glad to bring to him hope 
and discouragement, and all the varied 
experiences of life. We know that he will 
understand. We know that he will care. 
And we know that he will help. 

The heart of prayer is companionship 
166 



THE GREAT COMPANIONSHIP 



with God. It does not begin as companion- 
ship. It often begins as a need with no 
language but a cry. It grows into com- 
panionship. That is the goal of prayer. 

There are three aspects to the great 
companionship. 

The first is companionship with the 
thought of God. Of course there is an abyss 
of fullness in the thought of God of which 
we know nothing. There is an infinite 
ocean of divine knowledge which is quite 
beyond us. But we may know some things 
about the thought of God. And we may 
know them quite surely and certainly. That 
is the very meaning of revelation. God 
has made himself known. He has caused 
us to understand some fundamental and 
eternally true things about himself and his 
thought of life. Now, prayer has as its 
mental aspect the entering into sympathy 
with the thought of God as it has been 
revealed to us. The great truths of the 
Bible, the mighty messages of the prophets, 
the fructifying and creative words of Jesus, 
the great interpretation of Christ's life and 
work which come from Paul, all the knowl- 
167 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



edge we have of that divine truth upon 
which our hope rests — this is all taken up 
into the life of devotion until it becomes 
a part of the very fiber of our spiritual 
life. Prayer is not devotion without ideas. 
It is great ideas enshrined in a worshipful 
life, which is filling itself with the very 
thought of God. 

The second aspect of prayer is that it is 
entering into companionship with the pur- 
poses of God. Here there is a volitional 
element in prayer. It makes demands of 
the will. It sets in motion the buzzing 
wheels of the activity. It becomes a dynamo 
by whose energy great deeds are made 
possible. It is a personal appropriation of 
God's program for human life. Here, again, 
the Bible has a rich and noble ministry. 
Here the past of Christian experience and 
history pours out its treasures. Here in 
personal surrender a man grows in con- 
sciousness of the will of God and makes 
that will his own. God's purpose for his 
own life as he can see that from the prin- 
ciples of the New Testament and the 
expanding life of the Church is to be 
168 



THE GREAT COMPANIONSHIP 



understood and loyally accepted. God's 
purpose for his friends is to be deeply felt, 
and a man is to seek eagerly for its accom- 
plishment. God's purpose for his com- 
munity, as Christian principles come to 
control it, is to be taken as a standard 
for whose realization he is to work. God's 
purpose for the life of the nation is to be 
brooded over, and as it shines out clearly, 
a man's consecration is to be given to 
helping in its realization. God's purpose 
for the world is to loom out like a mighty 
vision and in loyal commitment a man is 
to give himself to the assistance of all that 
makes for its accomplishment. Prayer thus 
is a great captain of the will, giving a man 
vast and noble tasks to which he is to 
commit himself. As in deep devotion he 
seeks to know the will of God and to con- 
secrate himself to it, he is entering into 
companionship with the purposes of God. 

The third aspect of prayer is companion- 
ship with the passion of God. Here we 
come to the great emotional element in 
prayer. After sympathy with the thought 
of God, and commitment to his purposes, 
169 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



the life is to enter into some companionship 
with the high intensity of love which 
broods over the world with yearning for 
its salvation. Calvary is the revelation of 
the passion of God. The Lord of all loved 
as much as that. He was willing to suffer 
as much as that. And Christians are to 
know something of the companionship of 
the cross. As God experienced the great 
outreach of suffering love, so his children 
are to share in that outreach of yearning 
longing. 

Here we come to the significance of inter- 
cessory prayer. A man comes to feel 
something of the meaning of the passionate 
desire of God to save his friend. In that 
hour when his heart is full of a sense of 
his friend's need and God's desire to save 
him, he prays for his friend. He has taken 
the burden of that friend upon his own 
life. He bends beneath the burden and 
he prays. 

The need of the Church comes home to an 
eager Christian. The infinite resources of 
God are ready for its using. And God is 
ready to pour them out. The burden of 
170 



THE GREAT COMPANIONSHIP 



the Church's need, the appreciation of 
what it might become through the grace of 
God, and of what he is longing to do for 
it, comes upon a man's heart, and he prays. 

The need of the world is made real to 
a man. He sees the vision of its helpless 
sinfulness. He sees the glorious future God 
is ready to give. He sees the influence of 
redemption making every human desert 
blossom as a rose. He feels the weight of 
the world lying heavy upon the heart of God. 
He feels it lying heavy upon his own heart. 
The unfathomable love of God seems like 
an infinite heartache struggling with the 
sins of men. The tragedy of all this, the 
glory of what may be, fills a man's heart, 
and he prays. For his brother, for his 
Church, for the world, he has prayed the 
great prayer of intercession. He has en- 
tered into companionship with the passion 
of God. 

A great sense of God's care for his own 
life, of the Infinite Heart that has time to 
feel a pang for his failure, and joy in his 
victory, comes to a man. In some great 
hour the ministry and the death of Christ 
171 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



are made real as for him, God's gift for 
his salvation. It is an hour of infinite 
humility. It is an hour of infinite hope. 
He comes to understand that passionate love 
which does not lose sight of him among 
the multitudes, but cares for him. And in 
this realization a revelation of the meaning 
of his own life and a revelation of the heart 
of God comes to him. 

So prayer at last lifts the plane of a man's 
life to the place where in some real sense 
he thinks God's thoughts after him, where 
in definite consecration he makes God's 
purposes the program of his life, and where 
a real passion for the triumphant achieve- 
ment of the great redemptive purpose moves 
through his heart. He has entered into 
companionship with the thought, the pur- 
pose, and the passion of God. And thus 
he has come to the very fullness of the 
life of prayer. 



172 



CHAPTER XIV 
CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP 



CHAPTER XIV 

Christian Stewardship 

The theory of Christian stewardship is an 
important part of Christian thought. The 
practice of Christian stewardship is a most 
important matter in Christian activity. 

The beginning of stewardship lies in the 
fact that we owe life and all we possess, 
and the world in which we live, and every- 
thing about it, to God. He made it all 
and in that sense we owe it all to him. He 
constantly sustains it all, and in that sense 
it is a constant gift from him. If we had 
originated anything, we might talk of actual 
ownership. We have originated nothing. 
We receive everything from the bounty of 
God. 

All this is the basis for a great religious 
stewardship. It is only a part of the basis 
for specifically Christian stewardship. 

The typical Christian is a man who owes 
everything to the cross. His conscience has 
found rest there. He has there found deep 
repose in spite of the memory of hated 
175 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



sins. The great energies of the new life 
have been set free in his heart as he 
accepted the Christ and the message of 
Calvary. Everything which makes life full 
of meaning and opportunity and richness 
and infinite hope comes from the cross. 
It is the profound sense of everlasting in- 
debtedness to the great Sacrifice that makes 
the deepest motive for Christian steward- 
ship. Life is to be lived, talents are to be in- 
vested, everything is to be done in the light 
of the cross. Into this sense of the mastery 
of all life by the great redemption is brought 
the added sense that because of creation 
and the constant upholding of all life by 
the presence of God, it all belongs to him. 
So stewardship is a matter of ownership 
thrice enforced. By creation, by the sus- 
taining of the world and life, and by re- 
demption, God is the owner of our lives 
and all that we possess. 

We are stewards of our bodies. With all 
the intimacy of association which makes 
them seem very life of our life, they do 
not belong to us. They are just loaned to 
us. They belong to God. We are to use 
176 



CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP 

them for him. The defilement of the body 
is not the misuse of what is our own. It 
is the destruction of the property of God. 
The body is to be kept and used and 
reverenced as a wonderful piece of God's 
workmanship, made by him, sustained by 
him, and made most sacred by the fact 
that God himself in human life used a 
body, looked out of human eyes, and spoke 
with human lips. The sacredness of the 
body and God's ownership of the body are 
never to be forgotten. 

We are stewards of the mind. Here we 
come to something more intimate and per- 
sonal than the body. Even here we cannot 
say "Mine." God has made our minds. 
No mental activity would be possible with- 
out the present sustainment of God. And 
this mental life of ours has new vistas of 
meaning which open before it since the great 
reconciliation of the cross. Our minds are 
to be used for God. They are the servants 
of God. Our thoughts belong to him. 
All the subtle, winding processes of our 
mental life are to be mastered by him. 
When we keep thought clear and honest and 
177 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



reverent, and urgent and richly responsive to 
all noble things, we are exercising Christian 
stewardship in the realm of the mind. 

Our emotions belong to God. Surely 
nothing seems much more definitely our own 
than our feelings. But God holds the 
secret of our emotional life, even as he 
holds the secret of our mental life. He 
made this organism with its capacity for 
feeling. He continually keeps it in activity. 
The great work on Calvary has one of its 
supreme outcomes in the cleansing and mak- 
ing completely healthful of the emotional 
life. Christian stewardship in the realm of 
the feelings consists in refusing to be driven 
into action at the call of any unworthy 
emotion, of so keeping the manhood, like 
a soldier who always fights under a noble 
flag, that by this very process the range of 
the emotional life will be made high and 
righteous. 

We are the stewards of our wills. Here 
we may be inclined to hesitate. Is there 
nothing which is our very own ? The will 
is the last citadel of the personality. If it 
is surrendered, all is gone. The answer is 
178 



CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP 



that all must go. There must be nothing 
left. All belongs to God. Stewardship 
which does not include the surrender of the 
will to God misses the very central implica- 
tion of our being God's possession. The 
capacity for deep personal intention is God's 
gift. The act of volition is impossible apart 
from God. The will is the very fortress 
whose mastery is one of the great results of 
the work on Calvary. 

Our wills are ours, we know not how, 
Our wills are ours to make them thine. 

It is the central purpose of the life with- 
out whose possession God is never content. 
When life is a constant endeavor to make 
our lives a response to God's will, and our 
wills the expression of his purpose, then we 
are realizing the meaning of Christian 
stewardship in the realm of the will. 

We are stewards of our activities. What 
we do is never done merely by our own 
effort. Every deed is possible because we 
live in a world God has made for deeds, 
and because he helps us at the moment 
of our activity. 

179 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Some deeds disintegrate and some up- 
build. Calvary is the great creator of noble 
deeds. By creation, by God's present co- 
operation in our activity, and by redemption, 
our deeds belong to God. This means 
that the commanding principle in our 
activity is to be the carrying out of the 
purposes of God. As we accept the great 
salvation, as we apply the new life to the 
whole circuit of our own lives, as we work 
for the regeneration of society and the win- 
ning of the world for Christ, we are realizing 
the meaning of Christian stewardship in the 
realm of action. 

We are stewards of our possessions. It 
is not merely that a little of what we have 
belongs to God. All we have belongs to 
God. He made it all. He keeps it a part 
of our experience. The experience of new 
life which he has given is a kind of occu- 
pancy of us by God which demands the 
consecration of all our possessions. 

What we use of our income for the sus- 
taining of our bodies, for the support of our 
families, for the upbuilding of our minds, 
for the enrichment of our lives is a part 
180 



CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP 



of our Christian stewardship. What we 
give to the* Church as the organized repre- 
sentative of Christ's kingdom, what we give 
to great benevolences, what we give to the 
mighty enterprise of mastering the world for 
Christ is also a part of our stewardship. 

Now, a practical question here arises: 
What proportion of our income can we 
legitimately devote to the completion and 
upbuilding of our own lives as the servants 
of Christ, and what proportion should be 
directed immediately to the great interests 
of the Church, of benevolences, and the 
world enterprise ? 

Here we meet the challenge of the 
ancient Jew. He gave at least a tithe of 
his income in the direct and immediate way 
of religious investment. With the light of 
the gospel shining upon us we can scarcely 
do less than did this ancient Jew. 

But our great motives are not to be found 
in ancient Israel. The thing which is to 
kindle our sacrifice is to be the sacrifice of 
the cross. That which is in our mind 
as we decide what shall be used for the 
Church benevolences and for the great world 
181 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



enterprise is to be the love which, though 
it was rich, for our sakes became poor, that 
we through its poverty might become rich. 
At the foot of the cross we are to decide 
about our gifts. 

Of course we need to be systematic in 
our giving. The minimum should be deter- 
mined and as carefully followed as a definite 
amount is adhered to in any business trans- 
action. For ordinarily situated people the 
tithe is a most convenient and proper 
minimum; for a man of wealth of course 
the minimum should be far greater than the 
tithe. 

Then, after this minimum, the leaping 
heart full of the love of Calvary will often 
give larger gifts. There must be this place 
for spontaneous giving. Christian steward- 
ship must never be so interpreted as to 
rob our practice of the glad and sacrificial 
surrender of love. 

And we must keep in mind the prin- 
ciple already laid down that we are the 
stewards not only of what is directly given 
to the purposes of the kingdom. We are 
stewards of all that we possess. We must 
182 



CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP 



use it all in such fashion as to express our 
loyalty to God, and to his great purposes, 
and in such fashion as to secure his approval. 

All that we are, all that we think, all 
that we feel, all that we do, all that we 
possess belongs to God. We are trustees of 
God's property in respect of all these things. 

We must remember, however, that God 
does not desire us to have a slave's sense 
of being property. We belong to God, to 
be sure, but we belong as sons and not as 
servants. The defining thing about Chris- 
tian stewardship is that it has a noble 
element of spontaneity. It is like the feel- 
ing of a son toward his father. It is not 
mechanical. It is not calculating. It is 
based on natural right. But it is glorified 
by love. 

Christian stewardship is the stewardship 
of love. God owns us because he created 
us, but our loving sense of this changes it 
from a hard, cold fact to a noble inspira- 
tion. God owns us because he sustains our 
lives, but love makes this a joyous compan- 
ionship of spontaneous appreciation. God 
owns us because Christ died to redeem us 
183 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



and save us from the destruction of all 
which makes life precious. This kindles our 
devotion until in return we would give 
whatever Christ desires. Stewardship is 
based on the rights of God. It is trans- 
figured by the spontaneity and eagerness of 
a great love. 



184 



CHAPTER XV 
THE GOD OF THE PREACHER 



CHAPTER XV 

The God of the Preacher 

The preacher's doctrine of God is not 
merely a set of great ideas. It is not simply 
a formulation of ultimate conceptions. It 
is not simply a major premise back of all 
his thinking. It is more than the last 
refuge of his logic and the point of depar- 
ture for all his thought. All this the doc- 
trine of God is to the preacher. He does 
not seek for a Deity about whom he cannot 
make any definite affirmations. He does 
not fail to see that the mind must find a 
resting place in its thought of God. He 
takes many a train of thought which leads 
to the conviction of the necessity of the 
Deity, and he constructs his doctrine of 
God with all possible mental care. He 
sees no way to account for rationality with- 
out God, and the very validity of the 
rational process he finds at last buttressed 
by faith in a rational God. But while all 
this is true, the God of the preacher is 
something much more immediate and con- 
187 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



vincing than a necessary conception. He is 
more than an influence. He is an expe- 
rience. This is what makes him the God 
of the preacher. You can talk about an 
influence, but you can proclaim an ex- 
perience. The preacher has something to 
proclaim. 

First of all, the God of the preacher is 
a Person. The preacher can appreciate 
those vague elusive moods of companionship 
with the vast unseen which go to make 
up the religion of the pantheistic poets, 
but to him religion is something very much 
more concrete and definite. It is the 
experience of fellowship with a person. God 
is the great companion. He knows. He 
loves. He wills. It is the touch of this 
Infinite Knower, and Lover, and Master of 
Will upon his life which gives content to 
his thought of God. The very essence of 
his experience is the consciousness that the 
great Lord of Life thinks and understands 
and cares. Without this sharp sense of a 
Person who hears and answers, religion 
would lose its deepest meaning. The 
preacher goes to his pulpit driven by the 
188 



THE GOD OF THE PREACHER 



compulsion of a personal relation with a 
personal God. 

Two corollaries of his experience of God 
are worthy of emphasis. His God is the 
God who is Creator and sustainer of all 
that which exists. This assumption moves 
through and enriches all his devotion. 
There is not another God somewhere who 
is the real source of things. There is not 
another God somewhere who is the real 
sustainer of life. This God — his God — the 
God of his prayer and companionship — is 
the Author and upholder of all. Without 
this conception his experience would be 
impoverished beyond recognition. Then the 
God of his experience is the Infinitely Near. 
He is the vital power in all that which 
we experience as part of life. Transcendent 
as the Author and Master of all, he is 
immanent in all, the real potency in all the 
activity of life. This conception is part of 
the richness of the inner experience, of the 
brooding consciousness of the constant pres- 
ence of God everywhere. It is not simply 
the religious utilization of an intellectual 
conception. It is a part of that full-orbed 
189 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



piety which blooms out into conceptions of 
its own. 

The God of the preacher is a God of 
complete and perfect knowledge. All reality 
is open to him. Of all that is he is cognizant. 
The vast whirling system of things is ever 
the possession of his thought. The minutest 
experience of the minutest form of life is 
known to him. Every human life is read 
by him. He traces all thoughts down 
the dim corridors of the life to their spring 
in the motives and intentions of men. 
He sees all deeds. He hears all words. He 
knows not only what men do but what 
they mean by what they do. Full of awe 
and full of joy is the thought of the per- 
fect knowledge of God. 

Then the God of the preacher is a God 
of flaming ethical life. The voice which 
cries "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not" 
in the heart of the preacher is the voice 
of God. Conscience is God articulate in 
the preacher's life. The categorical im- 
perative is the imperative of God. The 
preacher's experience of God is an expe- 
rience of nearness to an ethical burning 
190 



THE GOD OF THE PREACHER 



bush. He must take off his sandals because 
he stands on holy ground. And the funda- 
mental thing about this consciousness of 
God as ethical is that it places the source 
of all things moral in the nature of God. 
It is not simply that God commands right- 
eousness. It is that God is righteousness 
alive. It is not that there is a moral law 
to which God conforms. God is the moral 
law. All the things of righteousness are 
thus given the highest possible dignity, and 
the nature of God is seen in its true 
character as the very source of the moral 
distinction. This ethical flame which runs 
through the preacher's experience of God 
gives a new emphasis to his life and his 
preaching. It sharpens his speech to a 
moral demand vibrant and compelling like 
that of the Hebrew prophets. He has 
stood with them in the place where he 
has seen the vision of God as a moral 
fire, and this experience gives a note which 
is a constant part of all his thought and 
speech and activity. 

The God of the preacher is a God of 
infinite love. When he uses such a phrase 
191 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

as the "heart of God" he is not using 
idle words. The God whom he has met 
in the solitude of his deepest experience 
is a God of infinite tenderness and yearn- 
ing, suffering, outreaching love. He has 
seen the face of God in the face of Christ. 
And Calvary has forever stamped upon the 
portrait of God which hangs in his heart 
the wonder of sacrificial love. His God 
cares for his world and suffers for it. 
There is a divine heartbreak over the sin 
of men which Calvary has made known 
and which reveals the depths of the love 
of God. The preacher has stood before 
Calvary in his deepest experience of the 
presence of God, and, standing there, he 
has welcomed to his heart the infinite for- 
giving love. 

The God of the preacher is a God with 
boundless richness of life. Every valid 
human experience is the symbol or echo 
of something in the life of God. The 
world about us is full of the sense of him. 
Heaven-kissing mountains and quiet, peace- 
ful valleys hidden among the hills tell 
something about God, for they are the 
192 



THE GOD OF THE PREACHER 



thoughts of God. The wide, heaving 
ocean, and the far-lying, bright shining stars 
are hints of the variety and richness of the 
life of God, for they too reflect his thought. 
The man with a personal experience of 
God appropriates all nature and interprets 
it in the light of that experience. He finds 
in human life at its best many a hint of 
the divine, for it too is God's workman- 
ship, and in all varied types of thought 
and speech and life he sees a reflection of 
the versatility of God. Even in such 
human characteristics as the sense of incon- 
gruity and the feeling of the laughter of 
things he sees some hint of a cosmic humor. 
It is only in sin that he sees that which 
is utterly foreign to the nature and charac- 
ter of God. 

With all this richness and diversity of 
life, this white-glowing righteousness and 
tender, yearning love, the God of the 
preacher is a God whose life is organized 
into perfect harmony and unity of meaning. 
The total life of God, every part fitting into 
every other part, is a great organic har- 
mony. It is this total life which is ex- 
193 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



pressed in the acts of God. It is this total 
life which Calvary satisfies. The cross is 
the expression and satisfaction not merely 
of one of the attributes of God, but of his 
total life in relation to sin. This expression 
— this getting into deed of the total charac- 
ter of God as he faces sin's tragedy — is the 
central spiritual meaning of the great ex- 
piation. 

So the preacher's experience of God 
grows and deepens until it touches all of his 
experience and all of his life. Does his 
mind cry out for a final resting place ? He 
finds it in the adequacy of his thought of 
God. Does his conscience cry out for a 
master and a friend? He finds the answer 
in the ethical nature of God and the moral 
discernment which is central in God's own 
life. Does his heart yearn for love in the 
soul of all things ? This yearning is an- 
swered to by the God whose very nature 
is love and whose undying tenderness has 
been revealed on the cross! Do a thousand 
dim and varied senses of meaning to be 
found in life cry out for a place back in 
the ground of things? The thought of the 
194 



THE GOD OF THE PREACHER 



infinite richness of the life of God answers 
to this longing. God is not the intense, 
accentuated, eternal existence of simply one 
or two qualities, however great and impor- 
tant they may be. Every real and whole- 
some thing in the life of the universe has 
some basis in the life of God. Does the 
life marred and broken by sin call for a 
great reconciliation ? The sense of God's 
infinite life in all its relation to sin being 
so expressed on Calvary as to satisfy God 
himself, and all this done in such a fashion 
that when a sinful life finds oneness with 
God again there is no dark past able to 
frown it into despair, comes with infinite 
calm to the soul. 

The God of the preacher is an intense, 
rich, perfect personality, the consciousness 
of whom becomes more and more master- 
ing in the preacher's life. Mind, con- 
science, heart, and will find satisfaction and 
energizing in the experience of contact with 
the living God. 



195 



CHAPTER XVI 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF THE 
DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 



CHAPTER XVI 

The Practical Value of the Doctrine 
of the Trinity 

Is the doctrine of the Trinity a part of 
the structure of the ship which carries us ? 
Or is it a strange, heavy cargo of whose 
use we have not the slightest notion, but 
which we carry in a large compartment 
in the vessel none the less ? In this age, 
with no particular gift for metaphysics, 
there are a good many people who would 
probably say that the historic doctrine of 
the Trinity represents so much useless 
cargo which would better be thrown over- 
board; and among the doctors there are 
doubtless those who would agree with al- 
most as emphatic a putting of the matter 
as this. With the urgent practical demands 
of modern life upon us, why should we 
encumber the Church with a metaphysical 
dogma which nobody understands and 
which proves a stumbling-block in the way 
of many earnest minds ? 

The preacher-theologian hears such stric- 
199 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

tures as this not without sympathetic under- 
standing. He knows what eagerness about 
the practical matters of the kingdom of 
God is behind them, what sincerity, and 
fine desire to put no unnecessary burden 
on the mind of the Church. He hears with 
comprehension, but he is in no haste to 
join the voices lifted in depreciation of the 
historic position of the Church as regards 
the Trinity. He knows that our age very 
much resembles the disciple Peter in its 
habit of speaking out before it has realized 
all the implications of its speech. It would 
be better to wait and ponder and be sure. 
If we were to discard the doctrine of the 
Trinity, we might discover that we had 
lost more than we knew. 

There is something very appealing in the 
thought of the infinite richness and fullness 
of God's life. But how is it to be secured ? 
Is a lonely Only One in the awful isolation 
of eternal silence the God of a rich and 
varied life ? When we stop to think of it 
our theism seems to prove too much. It 
gives us unity. But if we are not watchful, 
it will give us a blank and awful loneliness 
200 



DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 



which is the very opposite of all we need 
to find in the God back of this infinitely 
varied world and the rich experience of com- 
panionship in which the Christian knows 
him. 

Here at once we find a point of contact 
with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. 
The Christian conception of God is not a 
hard and rigid type of theism which at 
last reduces the life of God to an empty 
stare. There is one God, but there are 
three centers of consciousness and volition 
and love in the Divine Life. There is 
unity of fundamental being. But there are 
three centers of divine experience. There 
is perfect ethical harmony. There is com- 
plete metaphysical unity at the base of all. 
There is similar completeness in the knowl- 
edge of each of the Persons of the God- 
head. There is a distinction among the 
three which we express by the term 6 'Father' ' 
when we refer to the basic center of per- 
sonal life. And yet each is eternal, and 
together they live the infinite, beatific life 
of the Deity. 

Now, doubtless there is much mystery 
201 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



here, and doubtless it will be easy to raise 
verbal problems. But some important con- 
siderations must be remembered. First: 
Our aim is not to comprehend the Trinity. 
Of course the life of God must contain 
mysteries we cannot unravel. And a mys- 
tery you cannot explain looks like a con- 
tradiction. Second: Our task is not to 
explain God, but to explain everything else. 
The proof of the doctrine of the life of the 
Godhead lies not in the fact that it is 
made completely clear to finite minds, but 
that it is a key which fits every lock, a final 
truth which explains the world. Not What 
academic fault can you find with it? but 
How does it work as a key to life ? is the 
penetrating question. Not whether we can 
explain this mystery, but whether it makes 
clear other mysteries, is what we desire to 
know. Not How much light can be thrown 
on the Trinity? but How much light does 
the Trinity throw on everything else ? we 
must ask. 

So the test is really a test which the 
preacher-theologian is particularly fitted to 
make. Does the need of our thought and 

202 



DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 



life drive us back to the Christian concep- 
tion of the Trinity? Does this conception 
eventuate in creative thought and fuller and 
more adequate life ? 

We have seen already that the richness 
and variety in the life of the world is best 
answered to — no, may we not say, only 
answered to — by a richness and fullness in 
the life of God. And this the doctrine of 
the Trinity gives. 

But let us go deeper. One of the most 
defining aspects of human life is its social 
expression. Men belong in social groups. 
Family life and friendship are essential char- 
acteristics of humanity. The town, the 
state, and an infinite variety of social groups 
are the inevitable expression of human na- 
ture. The great goal of the seers and 
dreamers of men is a social goal. The 
dream of brotherhood is one of the most 
priceless possessions of the race. Each life 
is to be a part of a vast sum of life to which it 
contributes all that it can give, and from 
which it receives all that it can assimilate. 
This represents a social ideal which seizes 
our minds with a mastering strength. Now, 
203 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



where does the social instinct come from ? 
What is the source of the social dream ? 
What is the basis of that sense of human 
solidarity which is more and more taking 
possession of our minds and hearts ? 

Does all this simply represent a wonder- 
ful thought of God, or does it come from 
the very nature of God? Did God just 
think it out when he was planning for 
man, or is it a reflection of the actual char- 
acter of the Divine Life ? 

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity 
affirms that there is an actual social life in 
the Godhead. An eternity of social expe- 
rience is the story of the life of God. For- 
ever and forever the Father and the Son 
and the Holy Spirit have lived in the 
infinite felicity of perfect love. The social 
dream, then, has its basis in the very life 
of God. The man who would have society 
become an organism of brotherhood, who 
would have society made into mutual self- 
giving and love, would have the life God 
has made become like the life of the maker. 
A perfect social life among men will be a 
reflection of the perfect social life in God. 
204 



DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 

All our social instincts, then, have the 
deepest possible basis. When a man feels 
his heart go out to a friend, it is some 
divine echo of the perfect fellowship of 
the life of God. 'When a human home is 
built about the altar fire of tender love, 
it is a symbol here among men of the 
perfect and eternal home life of the Trinity. 
There was a perfect home in the life of 
God before there was a thought of home 
among the children of men. When men 
turn from selfishness to brotherhood, when 
they give themselves to high altruistic serv- 
ice, again one hears the echo of that 
which is a deep reality in the nature and 
activity of God. The brotherhood of the 
Church, in so much as it realizes God's 
plan of loving and sacrificial fellowship, is 
another expression of that which is perfect 
in God's own life. The great goal of 
society, a perfect brotherhood with evil cast 
out and love enthroned, will be a final 
answer in human experience to that which 
is deep and real in the life of God. Every 
meaning and quality of the social instinct 
call for that which the doctrine of the 
205 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Trinity gives to us. A social world demands 
a social God. 

But even the individual Christian expe- 
rience needs the Trinity. The heart of 
individual Christian experience is the sense 
of the love of God. But a loving God 
must be a God who is actually loving. 
Did God's power to love slumber until 
man was created? Then love is not an 
eternal and essential characteristic of God. 
Was God eternally active in loving fellow- 
ship — the Father and the Son and the 
Holy Spirit — an eternal activity of love? 
Then the love which touches the Chris- 
tian heart is indeed an expression of 
the very life of God. With nothing less 
than this can the Christian be satisfied. 
Such a conception is implicit in Christian 
experience. 

The individual man with an empty heart 
waiting for the discovery of the love of 
God is like a weary wanderer approaching 
a brightly lighted house. Within is warmth 
and within is joyous fellowship. His heart 
warms as he sees through the windows 
the picture of fine fellowship within. To 
206 



DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 



the perfect fellowship of the Divine Life 
the soul of man is drawn. It is not a 
Divine Hermit who is Master of Life. The 
human pilgrim is called to come to the 
heavenly home. 

A new sense of the solidity and ultimate 
triumph of all social aspiration is given 
by such a view as this. In a world of 
jarring selfishness do men dream of brother- 
hood? The dream will come true, for it 
is already as real as the life of God. The 
prophet of brotherly love is not the tune- 
ful singer of a day which will never come. 
He has not woven powerless words into 
sweet but impotent music. He is not an 
erratic visionary carried captive by vain and 
impossible imaginings. His truth is as 
solid as the life of God. That which he 
has seen in vision God already is, and 
men must become. He has the future on 
his side. He has the Master of Life on 
his side. The basis of all that he says 
is the very nature of God. 

Turning to his New Testament, the 
preacher finds a current of thought and 
experience in relation to God which could 
207 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



only eventuate in the Christian doctrine of 
the Trinity. In the great intercessory 
prayer he finds that Jesus placed the basis 
of the unity and brotherhood of the Church 
where he has placed it — in the nature of 
God — "that they may be one, even as we 
are one." The Father and the Son and the 
Holy Spirit appear distinctly in the New 
Testament, yet all the while there is the 
clearest consciousness of the fundamental 
unity of the being of God. 

All the preacher's speech and ministry 
is enriched by his conception of God as 
triune. As he looks out on his own day, 
with its seething social passion, he sees in 
this very ferment of the aspirations for 
brotherhood something he can connect with 
his deepest thought of God. 

As in prayer he looks up to the heavenly 
Father in the joy of the great companion- 
ship, he has a deeper, richer experience, 
because he believes that God has been a 
Companion forever. Fellowship is no new 
quality of God. It is the experience of 
his very life. As the preacher dreams his 
own dream of brotherhood and self-giving 
208 



DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 

love he is strengthened in his faith as he 
remembers that he too is desiring that men 
may be what the Divine Life already is — 
a conscious and active union of perfect 
love. 



209 



CHAPTER XVII 



THE PREACHER AND RELIGIOUS 
AUTHORITY 



CHAPTER XVII 

The Preacher and Religious 
Authority 

The preacher must have an authority 
which masters him. He must speak with 
such authority that he masters other men. 
Sweetness and light are very important 
characteristics of religion, but power is 
more fundamental. The imperial religion 
is the only religion which can really answer 
human need. There is a sense of absolute- 
ness and of finality without which the 
voice of religion becomes impotent. 

Now, how is the preacher to find this 
note of commanding authority? How is 
he to find it for himself and how is he to 
find it for others ? 

Sometimes men are tempted to try to 
be authoritative by being assertive. They 
substitute dogmatism for assurance. But 
the authority of powerful lungs, while it 
may be insistent, is not very convincing. 
The authority of noise is a power which 
wanes and finally disappears. 

213 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



A man may try to find his authority in 
a water-tight logical system. He seeks an 
interpretation of life which by its perfect 
fitness and harmonious articulation will 
command his assent. Now, no doubt much 
valuable work may be done along this 
line. But some important observations 
must be made about the result. All logical 
processes go back to some major premise, 
unless one is reasoning in a circle, and, at 
any rate, there is a great assumption at 
last. The whole splendid structure rests 
down somewhere on what must be taken 
for granted. So the ideal of a system with 
perfect proof everywhere breaks down. If 
conviction is to rest on a reign of absolute 
logical proof, it is an impossible dream. 
Then this logical structure, when it aspires 
to the completion of the interpretation of 
the whole life, requires a will to believe 
before it becomes in any way commanding. 
Logic must be supplemented before it be- 
comes a very real thing in a man's life. 

In the third place, this world-view as 
an influence lacks driving power. It may 
be correct enough as far as we may see. 
214 



RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY 



We may not feel inclined to criticize or 
disagree. But the view as a set of logically 
arranged conceptions is not dynamic. It 
has no creative power. It lacks mastery. 
Formal logic, though a most useful mental 
instrument, can never give us a really 
compelling authority. 

Sometimes a man tries to rest in the 
authority of an institution. Here is a 
venerable and august ecclesiastical system 
which claims the right of commanding the 
whole circuit of a man's religious life. It 
has made itself felt in the terms of many 
a civilization and language and clime. It 
comes to the man with a passion for infal- 
libility and offers him an infallible Church. 
A good many people are fascinated by such 
a conception of authority, and not a few 
find no little rest and content in it. The 
difficulties which this kind of authority 
meets are, however, of a very grave charac- 
ter. To begin with, it involves a surrender 
of personality. The right of individual 
mental grapple, the right of individual con- 
clusion and conviction, are given over for 
the sake of uniformity and a settled and 
215 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



undisturbed point of view. The result is 
not mental peace. It is mental stagnation. 
What is given is not a vital authority, but 
a tyrannical authority. Then the historical 
expression of the Church's life, with all 
its advances and retrogressions and right- 
about-faces, is anything but a confirmation 
of the claim that the Church is a steady 
rock of Gibraltar, and offers a mastering and 
really authoritative word to men. If you 
believe in the infallibility of the Church, 
you must do it in spite of the facts rather 
than because of the facts. 

Sometimes a man tries to find an aesthetic 
basis for authority. The beautiful to him 
becomes the commanding. A noble ritual 
is the deepest secret to him of the Church's 
power. A religion of taste is the goal of 
his desire. A commanding architecture, the 
appeal of noble music, and great and 
ancient phrases draw him with an inde- 
finable allurement, an inexpressible charm. 
There is a real place for the ministry of 
beauty in religion, but when this is the 
Church's only authority and religion's great- 
est sanction the life lacks what it most 
216 



RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY 



needs in a time of moral crisis. The love 
of beauty and the love of gratified emo- 
tions and pleasurable sensations are not 
far apart, and these latter may easily de- 
generate into vice. Your apostle of good 
taste too often turns out to be a voluptuary. 
A mere sense of the aesthetic values of life 
has never been able unsupported to keep 
men morally clean. 

Right here comes the man to whom 
conscience is commanding. He sounds the 
demand of the categorical imperative in 
our ears. The might of the ethical "Thou 
shalt" is the most authoritative thing in 
the world to him. Conscience is the king 
of life, and we must obey its high behests. 
There is much to be said for this doughty 
champion of the voice of moral command 
which rings in all our lives. Several 
difficulties, however, emerge here. The 
first is the failure of this inner sense of 
the potency and kingliness of righteousness 
to crystallize into an adequate point of 
view and its tendency to work out into 
the complexity of a thousand tiny moral 
demands as intricate as a Chinese puzzle. 
217 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Conscience is very much alive, but let alone 
it is likely to be a tree full of leaves, but 
with no adequate fruit. When we examine 
it closely we find that conscience is rather 
a sense of the need of an authority than 
an authority itself. It is the throne room 
of the soul. It is not the king sitting on 
the throne. Then the deepest experience 
of the race shows clearly that it is not in 
moral activity, but in some deeper thing 
that the great word of commanding peace 
is found. Conscience makes a man a 
pilgrim seeking an adequate authority, but 
it does not know how to guide him to 
the shrine. 

Sometimes men try to find their authority 
in a mechanically correct and infallible 
book. Of this we shall have more to say 
in the next chapter. Here it will be suffi- 
cient to state one or two principles which 
run athwart this conception. 

First, the authority of a mechanically 
correct book would be the authority of 
a perfect set of rules. To be adequate it 
would need to cover every possible individ- 
ual situation with a concrete demand. Of 
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RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY 



course such a book would be impossible, 
but, second, it would be a bad thing to 
have it if it were possible. The servile 
obedience to a complete rule book, with 
no other discipline than turning to the 
proper page, would dwarf the life of every 
man who lived by it. Personal struggle, 
personal thought and expression, all the 
richness of a noble individual life would be 
impossible. A terrible and destructive gift 
to any race would be a perfect book of rules. 

Where, then, is a man to look for an 
authority, and what are the marks by 
which he is to know it when it is found? 
The answer is that the truly authoritative 
is that which speaks with vital compulsion 
to a man's whole life, to his mind, his con- 
science, his heart, and his will, that which 
satisfies the outreach of every aspect of 
his life, and that which is mighty enough 
to organize all his life into efficacious and 
harmonious activity. That which speaks 
vitally to all of a man's life and proves 
creative in all the ranges of his experience 
and activity is the truly authoritative. 

With this conception of authority the 
219 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



preacher approaches the Christian religion. 
Wherever he meets it he finds a vital 
voice, and when all it has to say has been 
heard every aspect of human life and 
experience has been spoken to. 

Suppose he comes first with his mind. 
The view of life Christianity offers, its 
Lord who has created men and redeemed 
them, its sense of all that is, as immediately 
dependent on an infinite and august and 
perfect Person who is the great Master of 
Life, its lifting of the meaning of existence 
above the plane of the thing and finding 
a personal interpretation of the problems 
of the universe, its going back not to such 
figures of speech as ultimate forces, but to 
ultimate personal life — all of this speaks 
to the highest ranges of the mental life 
with a certain power to give noble satis- 
faction. 

Of course it involves assumptions, but 
this mental authority is not the authority 
of formal logic, but of a point of view 
so noble that it cannot be surpassed; and 
it is to be immediately supplemented and 
reenforced by the other compulsions exer- 
220 



RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY 



cised by that religion of which it is one 
aspect and expression. 

Suppose a man approaches the Christian 
religion through his conscience. It speaks 
morally rousing words like unto no other 
words of moral intensity in all the world. 
A moral fire always burns at the heart 
of the Christian religion. The behests of 
righteousness are enthroned in its life. But 
there is this curious strategy in the moral 
compulsion of the Christian religion: it 
gives peace to conscience at the very 
moment that it recognizes its demands. 
Conscience has a way of becoming a dread- 
ful, lashing tyrant. Christianity keeps all its 
power, but delivers us from all its tyranny. 
It gives a man moral energy without lead- 
ing him to despair, and moral faithfulness 
without making him a Pharisee. It makes 
him humble at the moment when he finds 
moral freedom, and spontaneous and eager 
instead of slavish in obeying the behests 
of righteousness. All this it does by giving 
him a Friend instead of a law to obey, 
a Saviour instead of a stinging past, and 
leading him in the way of trustful obedi- 
221 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



ence instead of the way of passionate, 
self-dependent activity. Nowhere else is 
conscience made mighty and yet kept from 
being a producer of havoc and despair as 
it is in the Christian religion. Here alone 
is conscience made the friend of man. And 
herein lies the moral authority of the 
Christian faith. 

Suppose a man approaches the Christian 
religion through his heart. Nowhere else 
is there a voice which speaks to the heart 
of man as does the voice from Calvary. 
Grant that the Son of God suffered there, 
grant that he did it to save the race, and 
such love as we have never dreamed of 
is there poured out upon the world. The 
heart of God is full of love for men. The 
love of God gave the gift of Calvary. 
The heart of God suffered infinite pangs 
for us. The voice of that self-giving love 
speaks with a finality and compulsion to 
the heart of men. The heart finds its 
master and its ultimate allegiance in the 
Son of God who gave himself for our 
redemption. 

Suppose a man approaches the Christian 
222 



RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY 



religion through his activity. He is busy- 
about great and noble tasks, but he is 
eager to find the most noble tasks and 
inspiration for their achievement. Nowhere 
else does he find such a program of activity 
as Christianity offers. Nowhere else does 
he find such inspiration in carrying out 
its behests. 

It is not simply in one of these ap- 
proaches that the authority of the Christian 
religion is to be found. It is in all of 
them put together. It is in the way in 
which Christianity speaks to the mind and 
the conscience and the heart and the will. 
It is its impact upon the whole life. It 
is in the way in which it can organize all 
the forces of the life into efficiency and 
keep them moving at the highest standard 
of activity. 

But all this is not merely something to 
be seen from the outside. It is something 
to be experienced from within. A man 
feels the urgency and the vitality of all 
this outreach and downreach and summons 
of the Christian faith. He stands on the 
brink. He has enough to justify a great 
223 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



leap of faith. He has enough to justify a 
great act of will. But that leap of faith 
and that act of will must be made ere 
the final place of certainty is reached. 

Then from within a man sees the mean- 
ing of the Christian faith. Then from 
within he knows its peace and final author- 
ity. The compulsion of an abounding life 
slays all doubts and satisfies all demands. 

This personal certainty is augmented and 
welded into new solidity by social rein- 
forcement. Every other Christian is an 
added strength to the man who himself 
has found peace in Jesus Christ. It is as a 
great social solidarity of saved men that 
they have found an unimpeachable author- 
ity. This consciousness of the corporate 
life of men with a common experience is 
the driving power on the human side of 
the Christian religion. 

The test of authority must always be a 
pragmatic test. How does it work? Does 
it produce a fragmentary life or a com- 
plete and well-rounded manhood? Does it 
speak to a part of the nature at the ex- 
pense of the rest, or to the whole full-orbed 
2U 



RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY 



life? Does it organize all there is of a 
man into the most he can become ? 

Measured by such a test, Christianity 
emerges triumphant. It speaks to all the 
life of a man. It speaks to all the life 
of society. It gives satisfaction and ex- 
pression to everything vital in the indi- 
vidual and to the larger fellowship of the 
race. It has an individual goal and a 
social consummation. And it is a dynamic 
to bring these things to pass. The au- 
thority of Christianity rests at last in its 
triumphant vitality. 

No man has more cause to rejoice in 
this conception than the preacher. It an- 
swers the needs of his own life. It answers 
the demands of his ministry. His message 
is one of authority, but not one of tyranny. 
It masters men, but never enslaves them. 
At the hour when it compels their allegiance 
it sets them free. 



225 



CHAPTER XVIII 
THE PREACHER AND HIS BIBLE 



CHAPTER XVIII 

The Preacher and His Bible 

The preacher is a man of men. He is a 
man of practical activity. He is a man 
of books. He is eminently a man of one 
book. That book is the Bible. In this 
chapter we want to say something of the 
preacher and his relation to the Book 
which is the literary dynamo of his ministry. 

What the Bible can be to the preacher 
depends to a remarkable degree on the 
conceptions the preacher has of the Bible. 
It must manage to adjust itself to his pre- 
conceptions and even to his prejudices. It 
does not have a clear field and no favor. 
The preacher may force the Bible to speak 
to him through such forms of thought 
about it that it is forever impossible for 
the full ministry of the Bible to be realized 
in his life. 

A man may come to the Bible as a 
perfectly correct code of laws for the 
governing of his life and the life of the 
people to whom he ministers. He will 
229 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



find moral illumination and stimulus and 
much practical guidance if he approaches 
the Bible in this fashion. But he will 
also find many unnecessary problems and 
his method will rob the Bible of much of 
its power. For the Bible was not written 
to be a book of rules for slavish obedience. 
It sets forth principles to be interpreted 
and utilized by a growing and expanding 
personality. We have already seen that the 
viewing of the Bible as a code makes 
humanity shrink. It also makes the book 
a much smaller and less vital piece of 
writing. An earnest man will lead a sin- 
cere but often confused life under the terms 
of such a conception. A man with less 
earnestness will become a Pharisee battling 
for verbal distinctions of no real importance. 

A man may approach the Bible thinking 
only of its inspiring spirit. He may glow 
before the warmth he finds there. He 
may treat the Bible as a sort of spiritual 
hearth fire where he is to keep his soul 
warm on winter nights. Much emotional 
glow will come from all this, and a life 
warm with a sense of the enrichment of 
230 



THE PREACHER AND HIS BIBLE 



the Bible's message. But if such a man 
fails to understand that the Bible gives a 
program of activity, as well as a fountain 
of inspiration, the Scriptures can never do 
their full work in his life. His eager 
enthusiasm must be crystallized into deeds. 
His glowing heart must inspire enthusiastic 
doing of the will of God. If the Bible 
is king of a man's emotions without being 
ruler of his deeds, it has a poor and in- 
capable ministry. We are not treating the 
Bible with respect when we go to it only 
to find spiritual thrills. 

A man may approach the Bible viewing 
it as a mechanically perfect expression of 
the will of God. He may believe in its 
verbal inerrancy. He may work out a 
logical position that only a Bible without 
a mistake can be a divine book. With 
this view he may close his mind to the 
problems raised by close and candid scru- 
tiny. He may be a Bible student of blind 
faith, not an investigator of fearless candor. 
Such a position will not rob the Bible of 
its power to speak great words, but it will 
make a man's relation to it in a measure 
231 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



artificial, for the Bible is not such a book 
as this view assumes. A man is reading 
into the Bible his own conception of what 
it ought to be, instead of candidly receiving 
the book as it has been given. The birth 
of candor is the death warrant of this 
view. It is important for us to see that 
the Bible can never be permanently honored 
by a method which refuses to face facts 
which lie on the very surface of its con- 
tents, not to speak of deeper cleavages 
which appear as we go farther into its 
composition. The Bible's authority must 
be preserved without forced arguments or 
artificial and unreal defenses. 

A man may come to the Scriptures in 
such a mood of cool, critical inspection 
that he has an eye only for the problems 
it presents. To such a man the Book 
becomes a dead body from which the life 
has fled. His work is not without its 
value. Many of the questions he raises are 
real questions. Many of the discussions he 
conducts will prove of importance in the 
field of scholarship; but if his sole interest 
is here, he misses the real significance of 
232 



THE PREACHER AND HIS BIBLE 



the Bible, and even in matters of scholar- 
ship his judgment is often untrustworthy 
because he has no deep apprehension of 
the great creative moral and spiritual cur- 
rents which move through the Book. To 
judge a book even in matters of literary 
criticism you need to know what it is 
about. Of course this man who brings 
nothing but critical acumen to the Bible 
does not find the message to set a preacher's 
heart on fire. 

A man may approach the Bible as an 
earnest moral struggler. He finds in this 
book an interpretation of life which answers 
to his highest mood. More than that, it 
calls from above his highest mood. The 
Bible's words about sin and righteousness 
speak in a language of moral verity and 
authenticity which carry their own vindica- 
tion. The first thing an earnest man feels 
is that here is an interpretation of life 
which sounds the same great note of moral 
tragedy and moral realism which he finds 
in life itself. When the Bible has spoken 
its word something in the far depths of a 
man's soul sounds forth a mighty "Amen." 
233 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Then the reader comes to the great 
figure which walks through the Gospels. 
It is a haunting picture. That winsome, 
perfect Man of Galilee seizes upon every 
outreaching nobility in a man's heart. 
Whatever may be the answer to critical 
questions, this portrait is the race's greatest 
moral and spiritual heritage. When he 
has really seen the portrait, the reader feels 
sure of that. 

When in the deep mood of moral open- 
ness he comes to Paul's interpretation of 
the death of Christ something else happens. 
The ethical vitality of Paul's words seizes 
him. The sense of Christ's death as a 
great achievement, which makes possible 
the forgiveness of sin and all the wonder 
of the new life, masters him. As he sur- 
renders to this conception the whole matter 
of the Bible and its mission becomes clear 
to him. In the joyful assurance of salva- 
tion he sees that the Bible is the book of 
redemption. Its adequacy lies not in minute 
and constant perfection of detail, but in 
the fact that it correctly portrays sin, that 
it gives a compelling view of Christ, and 
234 



THE PREACHER AND HIS BIBLE 



that it proclaims the moral strategy of 
the cross. Because it is the book of sal- 
vation, because it so presents the need 
of salvation, the Saviour, and the way of 
salvation as to penetrate men's consciences 
and master their lives, it is the adequate 
vehicle of the revelation of God. 

All that we have said in the last chap- 
ter of the authority of the fundamental 
truths and experiences of the Christian re- 
ligion may be affirmed of the Bible. It is 
the literary vehicle of these truths and the 
creator of these experiences. 

From the pages of the Bible there leap 
those facts and those calls of God which 
by their inherent vitality command men. 
The Bible is an open door. When a 
man who is really in earnest looks through 
the door there is that within which 
causes him to cast away doubt and fear 
and enter. 

These great and creative facts and truths 
do not need any artificial protection. They 
stand in their own might. You do not have 
to possess a mechanically inerrant Bible 
in order to believe in the deadliness of 
235 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



sin. You do not need to have a certain 
view of the book of Daniel in order to 
believe in the deity of Christ. You do 
not have to believe that the book of Jonah 
records sober history in order to accept 
the great redemptive deed on Calvary with 
your whole heart. When a man has come 
to rest in the personal appropriation of the 
great redemption, the Bible has come to 
a place of high and commanding authority 
in his life. But it is the authority of that 
which morally and spiritually satisfies. It 
is not the authority of formal and mechan- 
ical inerrancy. 

The man with this conception of the 
Bible may come to believe in the composite 
authorship of the Hexateuch. It will not 
cause his hold of God to loosen. He is 
saved by faith in Jesus Christ the Son 
of God, who died for men. He is not 
saved by faith in the Mosaic author- 
ship of the first series of books in the Old 
Testament. 

The man at peace with God through the 
great reconciliation may come to believe 
that the body of the second part of Isaiah, 
236 



THE PREACHER AND HIS BIBLE 



chapters 40 to 66, was written by a great 
unknown prophet of the exile. It will not 
disturb his faith. It is only the discovery of 
another Bible character. The words are not 
less true. They are not the less inspired 
because they were given through the lips 
of another man, rather than through the 
lips of Isaiah, son of Amoz. It simply 
means that another human heart was filled 
with the consciousness of God and the 
spirit of prophecy, that another man felt 
the divine compulsion and burst forth into 
noble speech declaring the message of God. 
We are richer by another prophet and 
have lost not a word of prophecy. 

It may be that many a view of date and 
authorship and of the method of revelation 
will be changed by modern investigation. 
As long as the full sense of the Bible's 
doctrine of sin, the full glory of the deity 
of Christ, and the full moral potency of the 
deed on Calvary are untouched there has 
been nothing of real value lost. 

The man with a redemptive experience 
adds to his fine candor and freedom from 
paralyzing fear or crippling prejudice in 
237 



THE THEOLOGY OP A PREACHER 

the presence of biblical criticism, one or 
two other characteristics. He has a fear- 
less belief in the supernatural. He never 
doubts a miracle because it is a miracle, 
if there was ethical occasion for it. His 
only demand in the presence of the claim 
of the miraculous is that the occasion of 
the miracle shall be worthy of the character 
of God. He has no hidden distrust, no 
vague self-conscious sense that, after all, 
God is not stronger than the system of 
things, which causes him to want to read 
the supernatural out of the Bible. 

Then he has a noble conservatism in 
respect of the claims of modern scholarship. 
He is not a man who goes forth in the 
morning saying, "What new theory can I 
find and accept this day?" He demands 
that Christian criticism shall move with 
caution, and weigh with greatest care its 
evidence. He is not ready to call brilliant 
and spectacular speculations the final find- 
ings of unimpeachable authority. He does 
not believe in the inerrancy of the critics. 
So his position is one of quiet and firm 
assurance. He has sources of certainty 
238 



THE PREACHER AND HIS BIBLE 



which criticism as such knows not of. 
The answer of his own experience has 
sealed his faith in the Bible as the author- 
itative book of redemption. Firm in this 
stronghold of a vital authority, he wel- 
comes all careful and reverent scholarship, 
and listens with open mind to the words 
of those who ceaselessly work at the task 
of investigating the Word of God, guided 
by a desire for truth and not having the 
processes of their investigation polarized by 
rationalistic presuppositions. Even from 
rationalistic scholars he may learn many 
things, but he knows that they do not 
have the secret of the Bible, and he 
watches their work with a certain alert and 
critical scrutiny. 

This is the attitude of the preacher- 
theologian who, with throbbing heart in 
which there is no fear, faces the inquiring 
eyes of eager men and women in this be- 
wildered and transitional age. His house 
is built on a rock. He does not fear the 
storm. He has nothing to hide, nothing 
to apologize for, and no conception which 
needs artificial defense. As long as the 
239 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Bible has the only message which will 
satisfy human need there is nothing to 
fear. It emerges after every critical combat 
remaining the invincible rock of the Holy 
Scriptures. 



240 



CHAPTER XIX 
PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 



CHAPTER XIX 



Peering into the Future 

The preacher looks within, and many a 
discovery he makes as he watches and 
ponders the processes of his own mind 
and heart. The preacher looks without, 
and as he inspects the lives of men and 
the interplay of influence and activity in 
the life about him, his knowledge of the 
motives and the working qualities of men 
and the social organism is vastly increased. 
The preacher looks backward, and as he 
meditates on the meaning of the life of 
great personalities and great peoples in days 
that are gone, his outlook is enlarged 
and his thought is given new perspective 
and fullness. The preacher looks forward. 
He is eager to draw aside the curtain and 
see something of the character and mean- 
ing of days to come. He would know 
what is to be the consummation of life in 
this world, and what is to be the con- 
summation in the other country beyond the 
veil. Then darker problems in the back- 
243 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



ground of his thought concerning the future 
of those who choose and love and desire 
evil clamor to be solved. 

He believes in a Christian consummation 
in this world. When individual men move 
out through the way of salvation toward 
the goal of sainthood, when they relate 
their Christian experience to all the rest 
of their thought and feeling and activity, 
when they apply themselves with all eager- 
ness to the great task of regenerating 
society and winning the world for Christ, 
all this involves the promise of a great 
consummation in this world. The men of 
triumphant Christian life, investing their 
whole strength in the achievement of the 
victory of Christ here and now, are not 
working in vain. Evil is being defeated. 
Reforms are being victoriously secured. 
With a mighty, quiet energy the forces of 
Christ are pushing forward toward the 
dominance of the world. The consumma- 
tion here has two aspects. The first is 
inner and complete victory in the lives of 
those who surrender their hearts to Christ. 
The second is power to hold in check and 
244 



PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 

thwart the evil designs of those who make 
the great refusal. The enthronement of 
good and the subduing of evil are the 
two sides of the Christian triumph in this 
world. The goal here is a world where 
there is enough of triumphant righteousness 
and devotion to Christ to master and rule 
the planet. But just because personality 
cannot be overwhelmed, just because the 
evil man, although he is checked and sub- 
dued in the expression of his evil, remains 
bad at heart, because even a perfect evan- 
gelism would not secure a perfect response, 
because in the kingliness of personality 
some men choose evil instead of good, 
this world will always be a world with a 
problem of evil. The fraternity of dark- 
ness will exist even in the days of the 
increasing triumph of the Brotherhood of 
Light. And this evil fraternity may burst 
the chains which bind it, may break forth 
into temporary strength, may fight to the 
death for a place in the life of the world. 
The eschatological discourses of Jesus and 
the forward look of the New Testament 
seem definitely characterized by a sense of 
245 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



dire evil breaking forth in gigantic struggle 
with the forces of God in the climax of 
the world's life. There may yet be such 
cataclysmic struggles between the forces 
of righteousness and those of evil, such 
heroic combat even after the wide achieve- 
ment of the victory of the sons of God, 
as shall make the great concluding epoch 
of the world's life. At any rate, such an 
outcome would be along the line of what 
seems very deep in New Testament con- 
sciousness. But any wild and clamorous 
outburst of evil, even in the largest and 
most heroic fashion, will be temporary. 
The final word is the triumph of right- 
eousness and love. The consummation is 
the perfect victory of the Son of God. 

When we look beyond the veil we must 
confess at once that there are many things 
we do not see. The distances are too 
great and the perspectives too vast for our 
unaccustomed eyes. The Bible is full of 
reserve and secrecy when we would turn 
to it for knowledge of the heavenly life, 
and altogether we must confess to think- 
ing under many limitations and with ini- 
246 



PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 



penetrable mystery on every side. At the 
same time there are some things we can 
be very sure of, quite as certain as we 
are of the Fatherhood of God and the 
tenderness of Christ. In the first place, 
the heavenly life will be a perfect expe- 
rience of perfected persons. Sin and suffer- 
ing, disease and death will be banished 
forever more. The righteous will find end- 
less felicity in the heavenly home. Each 
individual life will come to perfect flower 
and perfect expression. All hidden mean- 
ings and possibilities in each life will be 
brought into consciousness and realized. 
Eternal growth, eternal joy, and eternal 
service will be the lot of each one of the 
saints of God. 

That phrase "eternal service" points to a 
social as well as an individual consumma- 
tion in heaven. The other country is not 
to be a place where hermit saints enjoy 
lonely felicity. Perfected men and women 
are to find a perfect social life forever and 
ever; each will have something to give to 
all the rest, and each will have something 
to receive from all the rest. So heaven 
247 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



will be the perpetual service of the saints 
living together in an unending passion of 
self-giving in quenchless love. 

In this life all personal faculties will be 
enlarged and receive infinite possibility of 
exercise and enjoyment. And all this 
activity will be at once the perfect expres- 
sion of the individual life and the rich 
service of the heavenly brotherhood. The 
thing that most deeply expresses the life 
of each person will be the thing that most 
richly contributes to the whole heavenly 
brotherhood. The social life of the saints 
will find multitudinous expressions beyond 
all our thought. The dim dreams of brother- 
hood which we have here will be far sur- 
passed in the perfect social life, embodying 
itself perpetually in forms of new wonder 
and meaning and power. More than this, 
the perfected individual and social life will 
be in the presence and fellowship of the 
living God. That perfect social life of 
the Godhead will meet in actual touch 
the perfected life of the saints. The com- 
panionship with God which men have 
known in their hearts will be fully realized 
248 



PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 



in the actual contact of the heavenly ful- 
fillment. To live forever in the presence 
of God, to love forever in the presence of 
God, to serve forever in the presence of God 
— that is heaven. 

Many questions remain unanswered about 
the heavenly life. The one word about 
them all which may be said with complete 
assurance is this: the heavenly life will give 
to all who share it every gift which can 
come from infinite righteousness and in- 
finite love. Of this we may be sure, and 
with this we may well be satisfied. 

A dark, haunting problem lifts its head 
to confront us. We have been speaking of 
the future of the righteous. We have been 
speaking of the high felicity of the saints 
of God. What shall we say of the future 
of the wicked? What shall we say of 
those who deliberately and finally and 
eternally reject the outreaches of the love 
of God? It would be a pleasant thing if 
we could say that there are no such people. 
We would be glad if we could say that 
somehow, somewhere, every human soul 
will at last respond to the love of God, 
249 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

that the great surrender will at last be 
made by every person in all the world. 
We would be glad if we could say that. 
But we do not dare to say it. The Bible, 
with its close, penetrating consciousness of 
the actualities of human life, does not hold 
out that hope. And the more closely we 
study men, the more we are convinced 
that they are capable of a certain malignant 
vitality, of a real allegiance to evil, knowing 
that it is evil, of a personal commitment 
to the kingdom of sin as definite as a 
saint's personal commitment to the king- 
dom of God. That singular and regal 
choice of evil may go to the very center 
of the meaning of a man's life. 

If this is true, we would be glad to 
believe that when a man becomes totally 
bad, annihilation is his doom. We would 
be relieved if we could say that a man 
comes to a certain place where he has 
so completely allied himself to evil that he 
has severed all contact with the good 
which is the source of all. The penalty 
is just the loss of existence. The man's 
personal life vanishes from the universe to 
250 



PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 



appear no more forever. We would be 
relieved if we could say that. But we 
cannot feel that we are justified in saying it. 

When we study men who with powerful 
personal intention have flung their lives 
into evil, we do not find a waning vitality 
seeming just on the verge of extinction. 
Such personal choice of evil often has a 
mighty vigor. It is not weakness. It is 
strength. Only it is bad strength and 
not good strength. A man never seems 
more alive than when, gathering himself 
together for a great deed of decision, he 
acts. And as far as personal vigor is 
concerned, he is as mightily alive when he 
chooses evil as when he chooses good. 
There is often something about the psy- 
chology of a merely weak man which sug- 
gests waning vitality. But there is nothing 
of the kind about a really bad man. All 
the magnificent potencies of personal voli- 
tion are flung out in powerful mutiny 
against the good of life. There is nothing 
about it all to suggest a belief in annihilation. 

It seems then that we must believe in 
the future conscious existence of the wicked. 
251 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



And what we must affirm is that they will 
find a destiny which answers to their 
character. They have chosen utter evil. 
That choice has become one with the 
deepest meaning of their lives. The king- 
dom of God is impossible forever for them 
because they have made themselves forever 
incapable of understanding or responding 
to it. Their environment must be the 
reflection of their own character. It is 
not so much that they go to hell. They 
become hell. 

One thing must be said at this point. 
Beyond the veil the wicked will remain 
wicked in intention, but they will have 
lost all power of putting intention into 
efficient activity. God will have conquered 
them in the sense that they will have no 
power to thwart him. They will not be 
a menace to the Heavenly Brotherhood. 
Hell is an experience of perpetual but 
powerless intention to repudiate the reign 
of God. 

This is a conception from which we 
may well shrink, but the full facing of 
the moral significance of life seems to 
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PEERING INTO THE FUTURE 



drive us to it. And, terrible as it is, we 
see that it is without ethical cruelty. It 
is only those who have deliberately and 
knowingly and finally repudiated the out- 
reach of eternal love who will know this 
experience. We find a tragic note in the 
final universe if we accept this view. But 
it is a note of moral realism. It brings 
us at last to the place where we may see 
the full moral tragedy of the worst of 
life. And it is surely better than those 
delicate and sentimental philosophies which 
by their cloying sweetness would take all 
moral energy from the universe. 

Life itself is lived under awful sanctions. 
We do not dare to ignore the majesty of 
the moral must for the sake of even the 
demands of tender hearts. There will be 
a minor strain even in the heavenly con- 
summation. But it will be only after 
infinite love has exhausted itself beating 
against human hardness that a soul will 
be lost. 

The practical outcome of all this is an 
emphasis on the present. No one need 
choose evil instead of good. No one need 
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THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



choose darkness instead of light. The love 
of God has gone the full length of sacrifice. 
He who spared not his own Son calls us by 
all the pangs of the cross, calls us by the 
hour of agony on Calvary, to open our 
hearts and receive the great redemption. 
Everything that heaven offers will be ours 
if we will have it so. 

It is a great, glorious, tragic universe in 
which we live, with a mighty consummation 
here and a perfect consummation yonder. 
It has its high sanctions which we violate 
at infinite peril. It has its yearning sum- 
mons of infinite love which would lead us 
to the heights of God. We must choose. 



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CHAPTER XX 
THE CHRISTIAN WORLD-VIEW 



CHAPTER XX 

The Christian World-View 

There are a great many preachers with 
a fragmentary gospel. Some one Christian 
truth is forever shining in their sky. It 
is so dazzlingly bright that they can see 
nothing else. Some one experience fills 
their thought. It is so completely occupy- 
ing that they can think of no other. Great 
service is often performed by these apostles 
of a part of the Christian faith. The word 
they have to say is true and deep and real. 
They say it with passion. They give it 
forth with power. And its influence is 
responded to wherever they preach. 

As truly appreciative as we are of these 
men, there are one or two facts which we 
need to remember. First, it requires the 
whole of the circuit of gospel truth to 
complete the life of a man. Second, a life 
built on a fragment of Christian truth, how- 
ever noble and important that truth may 
be, is sure to be itself not only fragmentary, 
but disproportionate, and may even become 
257 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



ineffective and eccentric. The preacher 
needs a complete view of the faith because 
nothing less will enable him adequately to 
minister to the lives of his people. 

It is a matter for congratulation if a man 
has many Christian truths moving in his 
heart and his brain. The variety of his 
Christian interest and knowledge will make 
his ministry varied and fertile. He will 
touch the life and the interests of men in 
many ways. His preaching will be full of 
noble surprises as he brings from his 
treasure-house new thoughts and truths. 
His mental versatility will be a great asset 
to his Church and to the enlarging life 
of his people. But it is not enough to 
have many truths coming and going in 
one's mind like the guests at some great 
reception, with no deeper tie than the fact 
that they come to the same house. A 
man's knowledge of Christian things and of 
life must be classified and organized into 
a systematic and harmonious view of the 
world. He must not only have many 
truths at his command, but he must know 
their relation to each other, and the way 
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THE CHRISTIAN WORLD-VIEW 



in which together they unite to form the 
organism of Christian belief. This is a 
matter much profounder than putting con- 
ceptions into mental pigeon holes according 
to some artificial scheme. A man is not 
to force his conceptions into a mechanical 
and rigid system. He is to find the way 
in which they really unite according to 
their own nature. He is not to make a 
world- view. He is to discover a world- view. 

In a way life resembles those tiny and 
variously shaped bits of card which some- 
times lie confusedly on a table. Sitting 
by the table a man slowly pieces together 
the puzzle picture, until at last each small 
piece has found its place, and the com- 
plete picture fronts him. He does not 
cut the cards to fit some new plan of his 
own. He patiently works until he finds 
where each piece of card belongs. The 
preacher needs to be a man with a great 
passion for a complete world- view. It is 
only the whole picture with which he can 
be finally contented as he ministers to 
his congregation. And he needs great 
patience in seeking to find where each 
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THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



fact belongs. The sense that the facts 
must make the system, and not the system 
make the facts, will save a man from 
much academic superficiality and inade- 
quate thought. His aim is not merely to 
get a system, but to get a system where 
everv Christian fact and everv human fact 

t/ V 

will settle down in complete content, and 
the whole force and quality of all these 
facts will be preserved in the larger whole. 

Of course this is an endless task. But 
because there will always be more facts 
to place and enlargements to make in the 
great scheme, a man need not become 
discouraged and refuse to make any at- 
tempt to organize his knowledge into a 
system at all. He knows that he can be 
doing real work and making genuine head- 
way, though there is always more to be 
done. He is building a vast cathedral 
of the mind. And although it rises slowly, 
and many a part is yet to be built, he 
rejoices to be at work in relation to a 
structure where each detail has reference 
to the unity and harmony of the final 
building. 

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THE CHRISTIAN WORLD-VIEW 



A few suggestions may be made in con- 
cluding and summarizing this volume, as 
to the characteristic conceptions of the 
Christian world- view and the way in which 
they are to be joined together. 

For the Christian interpretation of life 
personality is the final fact. It does not 
go back to ultimate forces or ultimate 
things. It goes back to an ultimate person. 
Its whole philosophy of existence is built 
up out of personal experience, and finds 
its explanation in the perfect personal life 
of God. Only God is absolute. Every- 
thing else is dependent. Persons are his 
creation and live through his constant 
energizing. Things are his thoughts made 
concrete by his will in personal experience. 
Apart from God no person and no thing 
could exist for an instant. 

The vast system of things is real in the 
sense that it is a background of experience 
as dependable as the character of God. 
It is not real in the sense of an independent 
existence or the capacity to be a part of 
any experience except through the thought 
of God. 

261 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



Persons created by God have a real 
though constantly dependent life. The 
power of self-consciousness and self-direc- 
tion is God's great gift to personal beings. 

The Christian world- view has very defi- 
nite notions about the mental life of God. 
Surely that life transcends all that man 
can know. But as surely it includes some 
things that men may be certain of. Per- 
fect knowledge of all reality is the mental 
characteristic of God. There is nothing 
foreign to his thought and nothing beyond 
the ken of his mind. We do not have 
to form a description of the method by 
which God is omniscient, but we do know 
that it is impossible to think about him 
with validity except as the Infinite One, 
fully and constantly conscious of all that 
there is to be known. 

The Christian world- view has certain great 
conceptions of the character of God. His 
completely perfect nature is the basis of 
all ethics. The perfect is that which con- 
forms to the nature of God. The demand 
for this is written in the very nature of 
man. The very gift of self- direction to 
262 



THE CHRISTIAN WORLD-VIEW 



human beings involves the possibility of 
breaking from this standard. This break 
marks the entrance of sin into the world. 

The Christian world- view has certain 
great conceptions of the origin of the social 
meaning of life. God himself is a social 
being. There are social distinctions in the 
Godhead. Here are the ultimate source of 
love and the basis of all the human dream 
of fellowship. So the basis of all that 
we find in the mental, moral, and social 
experience of man and the explanation of 
all his life are to be found in the nature 
and character of God. 

The Christian world- view centers in a 
tragedy. The blighting effects of sin create 
the problem of which Christianity is the 
solution. To save human beings who have 
broken from God's perfect law and vio- 
lated the behests of their own natures — 
to rescue them and at the same time 
completely to satisfy all the high and holy 
sanctions of the life of God — is the great 
matter with the Christian religion. There 
are several aspects to the solution. The 
first has to do with a person great enough 
263 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 

to undertake to deal with the problem. 
Here emerges the full conception of the 
deity of Christ. The second aspect is the 
performance of a deed great and final 
enough to solve the problem. Here we 
come upon the death of Christ on the 
cross as the pivotal point in the moral 
history of the world. The third is the 
application of the great solution to all the 
need of men. Now comes individual accept- 
ance of the Saviour and his work, the 
experience of salvation, the call of the far 
goal of sainthood, and all the great expe- 
riences of the mastering of life and society 
in the name of Christ, and going forth to 
win the world by the power of the great 
evangel. 

The Christian world- view has certain 
great conceptions of the final universe. 
Here God is enthroned forever in the 
midst of the saints. For those who have 
responded directly (or with moral and 
spiritual intention indirectly) to the great 
evangel, there are endless life, growth, joy, 
and service, and the absence of sin, pain, 
and death forever. The fraternity of the 
264 



THE CHRISTIAN WORLD-VIEW 



saved has at last become a moral reflection 
of the life of God himself. For those who 
have deliberately and finally and absolutely 
set themselves against God there is the 
eternal submission of rebellious wills. God 
rules them, but they have no joy and no re- 
sponse to the love which surges through 
the universe. They represent the ultimate 
tragedy of perverse personality. 

The Christian world- view commends it- 
self to men not by any hard-and-fast logic, 
but by its moral and spiritual vitality. Its 
claim is that no other set of conceptions 
alive in the minds and hearts of men will 
so answer to every need and set free all 
the great energies of the growing life. 
Its vindication is that it brings to victory the 
best of life and overthrows the worst of life, 
that it is a living, energizing interpretation 
of existence and human experience which 
conserves everything worth conserving, and 
moves out in triumphant vitality to make 
the future of men full and rich and morally 
and spiritually adequate. 

The Christian world-view is a critic of 
other interpretations of life and its crit- 
265 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



icism comes at last to this. These other 
interpretations fail to do justice to the 
whole of life and experience. There is 
ethical or spiritual or intellectual flaw some- 
where. The advancing, expanding expe- 
rience of the race outruns them. They 
speak the voice of some aspect of experience 
but not of experience itself. 

So it is with the purely scientific ex- 
planations. They are brilliant as achieve- 
ments of classification. They organize our 
knowledge of phenomena in wonderfully 
efficient fashion, but they fail to answer 
those ultimate questions of the mind which 
lie back of classification. And they fail 
to do justice to the moral and spiritual 
aspects of experience. 

The outlook of agnosticism and pes- 
simism fails because they rule out two notes 
of growing and expanding life. Uncer- 
tainty and gloom are not parts of normal 
experience, and they cannot be made the 
constructive principles of an adequate phi- 
losophy. An organized uncertainty is a 
philosophical product which has quite lost 
contact with the realities of experience. 
266 



THE CHRISTIAN WORLD-VIEW 



And an organized gloom is an attempt to 
consider the abnormal, the decisive matter 
in human life. The healthful and out- 
reaching life of man simply brushes aside 
these world- views. Life itself has the right 
of way, and however learned and inspiring 
any particular interpretation of the prob- 
lems of existence and human experience, 
when it is smaller than life it simply must go 
down. 

The final Christian contention as to a 
world-view is that sin and regeneration, a 
divine Christ, a redemptive deed on Cal- 
vary, and a new and triumphant life com- 
ing from the acceptance of the Christ of 
the cross are the cardinal and defining facts 
of human experience. Any world-view 
which leaves them out is simply failing to 
see what is most important in human life 
and experience. These conceptions and 
facts express that which corresponds to 
the reality of things. Their vitality is 
their protection and defense. No inter- 
pretation which ignores them can per- 
manently secure itself. The facts are on 
the side of the evangelical interpretation 
267 



THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 



of life. And in this is its perennial 
security. 

The preacher-theologian rejoices as he 
approaches his tasks. He has an expe- 
rience which meets his deepest need. He 
has a message which will speak to every 
mental and emotional and moral and spir- 
itual outreach which has a place in the 
lives of his people. He has a world- view 
which interprets all of life about the com- 
manding personality of the Son of God 
and his sacrificial death — a world- view 
which conserves and expresses all which 
is called for by the great interests of the 
life of the race. 

All of this cannot be given forth at once. 
He is a patient, eager student of the life 
of his people. Day by day he gives forth 
that which is called for by their present 
experience, and that which will stimulate 
them to make further demand. Day by 
day he puts in place the stones which are 
one day to stand before them as a great 
temple of vital and commanding Christian 
thought. Day by day he gives forth that 
which is to issue in all the varied and 
268 



THE CHRISTIAN WORLD-VIEW 



multiplied activities of the Christian life. 
Some day his people will catch the splendor 
of the sight of the whole of the Christian 
faith. After that day has come they will 
always live in the light of the great vision. 



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